Ralph Waldo Emerson - Part 3

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The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson - Part 3

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Meantime, in the thick 
darkness, there are not wanting gleams of 
a better light, — occasional examples of 
the action of man upon nature with his 
entire force — with reason as well as 
understanding. Such examples are ; the 
traditions of miracles in the earliest anti- 
quity of all nations : the histcry of Jesus 
Christ; the achievements of a principle, as 
in religious and political revolutions, and 
in the abolition of the Slave-trade ; the 
miracles of enthusiasm, as those reported 
of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the 
Shakers ; many obscure and yet contested 
facts, now arranged under the name of 
Animal Magnetism; prayer; eloquence; 
self-healing ; and the wisdom of children. 
These are examples of Reason’s momen- 
tary grasp of the sceptre ; the exertions of 
a power which exists not in time or space, 
but an instantaneous in-streaming causing 
power. The difference between the actual 
and the ideal force of man is happily 
figured by the schoolmen, in saying, that 
the knowledge of man is an evening know- 
ledge, vespertina cognitio, but that of God 
is a morning knowledge, matutinst 
nitio, 

y 



MISCELLANIES. 


328 

The problem of restoring to the world 
original and eternal beauty, is solved by 
the redemption of the soul. The ruin or 
the blank, that we see when we look at 
nature, is in our own eye. The axis of 
vision is not coincident with the axis of 
things, and so they appear not transparent 
but opaque. The reason why the world 
lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, 
is, because man is disunited with himself. 
He cannot be a naturalist, until he satis- 
fies all the demands of the spirit. Love 
is as much its demand, as perception. 
Indeed, neither can be perfect without the 
other. In the uttermost meaning of the 
words, thought is devout, and devotion is 
thought. Deep calls unto deep. But in 
actual life, the marriage is not celebrated. 
There are innocent men who worship God 
after the tradition of their fathers, but 
their sense of duty has not yet extended 
to the use of all their faculties. And there 
are patient naturalists, but they freeze 
their subject under the wintry light of the 
understanding. Is not prayer also a study 
of truth — a sally of the soul into the un- 
found infinite? No man ever prayed 
heartily without learning something. But 
when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach 
every object from personal relations, and 
see it in the light of thought, shall, at the 
same time, kindle science with the fire of 
the holiest affections, then will God go 
forth anew into the creation. 

It will not need, when the mind is pre- 
pared for study, to search for objects. 
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see 
the miraculous in the common. What is 
a day? What is a year? What is sum- 
mer ? What is woman ? What is a ; 
child ? What is sleep ? To our blindness, j 
these things seem unaffecting. We make | 
fables to hide the baldness of the fact and 
conform it, as we say, to the higher law of 
the mind. But when the fact is seen 
under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable 
fades and shrivels. We behold the real 
higher law. To the wise, therefore, a fact 
is true poetry, and the most beautiful of 
fables. These wonders are brought to 
our own door. You also are a man. Man 
and woman, and their social life, poverty, 
labour, sleep, fear, fortune, are known to 
you. Learn that none of these things is 
superficial, but that each phenomenon has 
its roots in the faculties and affections of 
Uie mind, Whilst thp abstract question 


occupies your Intellect, nature brings it in 
the concrete to be solved by your hands. 
It were a wise inquiry for the closet, to com* 
pare, point by point, especially at remark* 
able crises in life, our daily history, with 
the rise and progress of ideas in the mind. 

So shall we come to look at the world 
with new eyes. It shall answer the 
endless inquiry of the intellect — What is 
truth ? and of the affections — What is 
good ? by yielding itself passive to the 
educated Will. Then shall come to pass 
what my poet said : ‘ Nature is not fixed 
but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. 
The immobility or bruteness of nature, is 
the abscence of spirit ; to pure spirit, it is 
fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient. Every 
spirit builds itself a house ; and beyond 
its house a world *, and beyond its world, a 
heaven. Know then, that the world exists 
for you. For you is the phenomenon 
perfect. What are we, that only can we 
see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar 
could, you have and can do. Adam called 
his house, heaven and earth ; Caesar called 
his house, Rome ; you perhaps call yours, 
a cobbler’s trade; a hundred acres of 
ploughed land ; or a scholars garret. Yet 
line for line and point for point, your 
dominion is as great as theirs, though 
without fine names. Build, therefore, 
your own world. As fast as you conform 
your life to the pure idea in your mind, 
that will unfold its great proportions. A 
correspondent revolution in things will 
attend the influx of the spirit. So fast 
will disagreeable appearances, swine, 
spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, 
prisons, enemies, vanish ; tliey are tem- 
porary and shall be no more seen. The 
sordor and filths of nature, the sun shall 
dry up, and the wind exhale. As when 
the summer comes from the south; the 
snow-banks melt, and the face of the earth 
becomes green before it, so shall the 
advancing spirit create its ornaments 
along its path, and carry with it the beauty 
it visits, and the song which enchants it ; 
it shall draw beautiful faces, warm hearts, 
wise discourse, and heroic acts, around 
its way, until evil is no more seen. The 
kingdom of man over nature, which 
comuth not with observation — a dominion 
such as now is beyond his dream of God 
— he shall enter without more wonder 
than the blind man feels who is gradually 
r^stQred to porfoct sight.' 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


^9 


THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 

Am Oration Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at 
Cambridge, August 31, 1837. 


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 
labour. We do not meet for games of 
strength or skill, for the recitation of his- 
tories, tragedies, and odes, like the 
ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love 
and poesy, like the Troubadours ; nor for 
the advancement of science, like our con- 
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 intel- 
lect 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, can- 
not always be fed on the sere remains of 
foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, 
that must be sung, that will sing them- 
selves. 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 
for a thousand years ? I 

In this hope, I accept the topic which not 
only usage, but the nature of our associa- 
tion, 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 
light new days and events have thrown pn 
tiij character, and his hopesi 


It is one of those fables, wliich, 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. 

The old fable covers a doctrine ever 
new and sublime ; that there is One Man 
— present to all particular men only par-* 
tially, 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 parcelled 
out to individuals, each of whom aims to 
do his stint of the joint work, whilst each 
other performs his. The fable implies, 
that the individual to possess himself, 
must sometimes return from his own 
labour to embrace all the other labourers. 
But unfortunately, this original unit, this 
fountain of power, has been so distributed 
to multitudes, has been so minutely sub- 
divided and peddled out, tha it is spilled 
into drops, and cannot be gathered. The 
state of society is one in which the mem- 
bers 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 ga ther 
food, is seldom cheered by any idea of 
the true dignity of his ministry. Ho 
seeks his bushel and his cart, and nothing 
beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead 
of Man on tlae farm. The tradesman 
scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to hia 
work, but is ridden by the routine of hij 

[craft, aad the soul is subject to doUars, 



MISCELLANIES. 


330 

The priest becomes a form ; the attorney, 
a statute-book ; the mechanic, a machine ; 
the sailor, a rope of a 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 theory of his office is contained. Him 
Nature solicits with all her placid, 
all her monitory pictures ; 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 the 
old oracle said : ‘ All things have two han- 
dles ; beware of the wrong one.’ In life, 
too often, the scholar errs with mankind 
and forfeits his privilege. Let us see him 
in his school, and consider him in refer- 
ence to the main influences ho receives. 

I. The first in time and the first in im- 
portance of the influences upon the mind 
is that of nature. Every day, tho sun ; 
and, after sunset, night and her stars. 
Ever the winds blow ; ever the grass grows. 
Every day, men and women, conversing, 
beholding and beholden. The scholar is 
he of ali men whom this spectacle most 
engages. 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 return- 
ing into itself. Therein it resembles his 
own spirit, whose beginning, whose end- 
ing, he never can find — so entire, so 
boundless. Far, too, as her splendours 
shine, system on system shooting like 
rays, upward, downward, without centre, 
without circumference — in the mass, and 
in the particle, nature hastens to render 
account of herself to the mind. Classifi- 
cation begins. To the young mind, every- 
thing 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 tyrannised over by 
its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying 
things together, diminishing anomalies, 
discovering roots running under ground, 
whereby contrary and remote things co- 
here, and flower out from one stem. It 

resently learns that, since the dawn of 

istory, there has been a constant accurau- 
(tlQQ and classifying of facta. But 


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 constitu- 
tions, all new powers, to their class and 
their law, and goes on forever to animate 
the last fibre of oraganization, 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, rela- 
tion, 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 ho has learned ta 
worship the soul, and to see that the natu- 
ral philosophy that now is, is only the first 
gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look 
forw'ard to an ever-expanding knowledge 
as to a becoming creator. lie 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 tho measure of his attainments. So 
much of nature as he is ignorant of, so 
much of his own mind does he not yet pos- 
sess. And in fine, the ancient precept, 
“ Know thyself,” and the modern precept, 
” Study nature,” become at last one 
maxim, 

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

The theory of books is noble, Tha 
scholar of the first age received into him 
the world around ; brooded thereon ; gava 
it the new arrangement of his own mind, 
and uttered it again. It came into hira 
life ; it went out from him, truth. It cama 
to him short-lived actions; it wjat gut 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


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 en- 
dures, it now flies, it now inspires. Pre- 
cisely 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 
the process had gone, of transmuting life 
into truth. In proportion to the complete- 
ness of the distillation, so will the purity 
and imperishableness of the product be. 
But none is quite perfect. As no alr-purnp 
can by any means make a perfect vacuum, 
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 co- 
temporaries, 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 trans- 
ferred 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 ; the 
guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and per- 
verted mind of the multitude, slow to 
open to the incursions of Reason, having 
once so opened, having once received this 
book, stands upon it, and makes an out- 
cry, 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, v/hich 
Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful 
that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only 
young men in libraries, when they wrote 
tliese 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 with the world and the soul. 
Hence, the restorers of readings, the 
emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all 
degrees. 


Books are the best of things, well used ; 
abused, among the worst. What is the 
right use? What is the oho end, which 
all means go to effect? 1'hcy are for 
nothing but to inspire. I had better never 
see a book, than to be warped by its at- 
traction clean out of my own orbit, and 
made a satellite instead of a system. The 
one thing in the v/orld, of value, is the 
active soul. 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 privi- 
lege of here and there a favourite, but the 
sound estate of every man. 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. They 
look backward and not forward. But 
genius looks forward ; the eyes of man are 
set in his forehead, not in his hindhead; 
man hopes ; genius creates. Whatever 
talents may be, if the man create not, 
the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; 
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 from another mind 
its truth, though it were in torrents ol 
light, without periods of solitude, inquest, 
and self-recovery, and a fatal disservice is 
done. Genius is always sufTiciently the 
enemy of genius by over-influence. The 
literature of every nation bear me witness. 
The English dramatic poets have Shake- 
spearized now for two hundred years. 

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. But when the intervals of 
darkness come, as come they must — when 
the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw 
their shining—we repair to the lamp* 
which were kindled by their ray, to guide 
our steps to the East again, where the 
dawn is. We hear, that we may speak. 
The Arabian proverb says, "A fig-trce, 
looking on a figtree. bocometh fruitful.' 



MISCELLANIES. 


332 

It is remarkable, the character of the 
pleasure we derive from the best books. 
They impress us with the conviction, that 
one nature wrote and the same reads. 
We read the verses of one of the great 
English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of 
Dryden, with the most modem 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 wellnigh thought and 
said. But for the evidence thence 
afforded to the philosophical doctrine of 
the identity of all minds, we should sup- 
pose 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, j 
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 
labour and invention, the page of what- 
ever 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 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 man- 
ner, 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 hospi- 
table 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, and pecuniary founda 
tions, though of towns of gold, can never 
countervail the least sentence or syllable 
of wit. Forget this, and our American 
colleges will recede in their public im- 
portance, whilst they grow richer every 
year. 

III. There goes in the world a notion, 
that the scholar should be a recluse, a 
valetudinarian — as unfit for any handiwork 
or public labour, 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 and diluted 
speech. They are often virtually dis^ 
franchised ; and, indeed, there are advo- 
cates for their celibacy. As far as this is 
true of the studious classes, it is not just 
and wise. Action is with the scholar sub- 
ordinate, but it is essential. Without it, 
he is not yet man. Withuot 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. Thq 
preamble of thought, the transition 
through which it passes from the uncon- 
scious to the conscious, is action. Only 
so much do I know, as I have lived. In- 
stantly 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 
run eagerly into this resounding tumult. 

I grasp the hands of those next me, and 
take n y place in the ring to suffer and to 
work, taught by an instinct, that so shall 
the dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I 
pierce its order ; I dissipate its fear ; I 
dispose of it within the circuit of my ex- 
panding life. So much only of life as I 
know by experience, so much of the 
wilderness have I vanquished and planted, 
or BO far have I extended my being, my 



THE AMERICA}^ SCHOLAR. 


d6mini6ilt 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, exaspera- 
tion, want, are instructors in eloquence 
and wisdom. The true scholar grudges 
every opportunity of action past by, as a 
loss of power. It is the raw material out 
of which the intellect moulds her splendid 

roducts. A strange process too, this, 

y which experience is converted into 
thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted 
into satin. 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 con- 
templative hour, it detaches itself from 
the life like a ripe fruit, to become a 
ihought of the mind. Instantly, it is 
raised, transfigured ; the corruptible has 
put on incorruption. Henceforth it is an 
object of beauty, however base its origin 
and neighbourhood. 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 self-same 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. Cradle and 
infancy, school and play ground, the fear 
of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of 
little maids and berries, and many another 
fact that once filled the whole sky, are 
gone already; friend and relative, pro- 
fession and party, town and country, 
nation and world, must also soar and 
sing. 

Of course, he who has put forth his total 
strength in fit actions has the richest re- 
turn 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, who, 
getting their livelihood by carving shep- 1 


333 

herds, shepherdesses, and smoking 
Dutchmen, for all Europe, w.mt 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 and 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. Years are well spent in 
country labours ; 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 mas- 
tering 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 splendour of his speech. 
Life lies behind us as the quarry from 
whence we get tiles and cope-stones for 
the masonry of to-day. This is the way 
to learn grammer. 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 Undu- 
lation 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 transmissson and reflection-, *' 
as Newton called them, are the law of na- 
ture 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 ane 
a weariness — he has always the resource 
to live. Character is higher than intel- 
lect. 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 
truths ? 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 dweU 
and act with him, will feel the force of kis 



MtSCELLANIBS. 


334 

constitution !h 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 m 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 unhandsei- 
led savage nature, out of terrible Druids 
and Bersekirs, come at last Alfred and 
Shakespeare. 

I hear, therefore, with joy whatever is 
beginning to be said of the dignity and 
necessity of labour to every citizen. There 
is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for 
learned as well as for unlearned hands. 
And labour is everywhere welcome ; al- 
ways 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. 

1 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 Think- 
ing. 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, unhonoured, and un- 
paid task of observation. Flamsteed and 
Herschell, in their glazed observatories, 
may catalogue the stars with the praise of 
all men, and, the results being splendid 
and useful, honour is sure. But he, in his 
private observatory, cataloguing obscure ' 
and nebulous stars of the human mind, 
which as yet no man has thought of as 
such — watching days and months, some- 
times, 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 stam- 
mer in his speech ; often forego the living 
for the dead. Worse yet, he must 
accept— how often I — poverty and solitude. 
For the ease and pleasure of treading the 
old road, accepting the fashions, the edu- 
cation, the religion of society, he takes the 
cross of making his own, and, of course, 
ike self-accusation, the faint beart the 


frequent uncertainty tnd loss of time, 
which are the nettles and tangling vines io 
the way of the self-relying and self- 
directed ; and the state ®f virtual hostility 
in which he seems to siamd 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 preserv- 
ing and communicating heroic sentiments, 
noble biographies, melodious verse, and 
the conclusions of history. Whatsoever 
oracles the human heart, in all emer- 
gencies, 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 het 
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 fetish of a 
government, some ephemeral trade, or 
war, or man, is cried up by half mankind 
and cried down by the other half, as if all 
depended on this particular up or down. 

I The odds are that the whole question is 
not worth the poorest thought which the 
scholar has lost in listening to the con- 
troversy. Let him not quit his belief 
that a popgun is a popgun, though the 
ancient and honourable 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 ob- 
servation, 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 tbai, 
he who has mastered any law in his private 
thoughts is master to that extent of all 
men whose language he speaks, and of ail 
into whose language his own can be trans- 
lated, The poet, in utter solitude remem- 
bering bis spontaneous thoughts and 



THU AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


recording them, is found to have recorded 
that, which men in crowded cities find 
true for them also. The orator distrusts 
at first the fitness of his frank confes- 
sions— his want of knowledge of the 
persons he addresses — until he finds that 
he is the complement of his hearers ; that 
they drink his words because he fulfils for 
them their own nature ; the deeper he 
dives into his privatcst, secretest, pre- 
sentiment, to his wonder he finds, this 
is the most acceptable, most public, 
and universally true. The people de- 
light in it; the better part of every 
man feels, This is my music; this is 
myself. 

In self-trust all the virtues are compre- 
hended. 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 tranquillity, amid 
dangerous times, arise from the presump- 
tion, that, like children and women, his is 
a protected class ; or if he seek a tempo- 
rary 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 — 
svhich 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 suffer- 
ance — 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 trust- 
less. It is a mischievous notion that we 
are come late into nature ; tiiat 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 anything in him divine, the 
firmament flows before him and takes bis 


335 

signet 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 colour of their present 
thought to all nature and all art, and per^ 
suade 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. Wher- 
ever Macdonald sits, there is the head of 
the table. Linnmus makes botany the 
most alluring of studies, and wins it from 
the farmer and the herb-woman ; Davy, 
chemistry ; and Cuvier, 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. 

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 prero- 
gatives. 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 : that is to say — one or two approxi- 
mations 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. 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 down- 
trod selves upon the shoulders of a hero, 
and will perish to add one drop of blood 
to make that great heart beat, those giant 



530 MISCELLANIES. 


sinews combat and conquer. He lives for 
us, and we live in him. 

Men such as they are, very naturally 
seek money or power ; and power because 
it is as good as money — the “ spoils,” so 
called, ” of oflSce.” 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 
splendour, 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 
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, wax- 
ing greater by all these supplies, we crave 
a better and 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. With the views I 
have intimated of the oneness or the 
identity of the mind through all indi- 


viduals, I do not much dwell on these 
differences. In fact, I believe each indi- 
vidual 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 Inlro^ 
version. Must that needs be evil ? Yi^e, 
it seems, are critical : we are embarrassed 
with second thoughts; we cannot enjoy 
anything for hankering to know whereof 
the pleasure consists ; we are lined with 
eyes ; we see with our feet ; the time ia 
infected with Hamlet’s unhappiness-— 

“ Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” 

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 ca& 
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 com- 
pensated 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 joy some 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 th« 
same movement which effected the eleva- 
tion 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 negli- 
gently trodden under foot by those who 
were harnessing and provisioning them- 
selves 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 vigour, when the extremities are 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


made aetite, when cuttents of warm life 
run into the bands and the feet. 1 ask 
not for the great, the remote, the roman- 
tic : what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what 
is Greek art, or Provencal 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 spiri- 
tual cause lurking, as it always does lurk, 
in these suburbs and extremities of na- 
ture ; let me see every trifle bristling with 
the polarity that ranges it on an eternal 
law ; and the shop, the plough, 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, Burns, Covvper, and, in a 
newer time, of Goethe, Wordsworth, and 
Carlyle. This idea they have differently 
followed and with various success. In 
contrast with their writing, the style of 
Pope, of Johnson, of Gibbon, 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 Swe- 
denborg. The most imaginative of men, 
yet writing with the precision of a mathe- 
matician, he endeavoured to engraft a 
purely philosophical Ethics on the popu- 
lar Christianity of his time. Such an 
attempt, of course, must have difficulty, 
which no genius could surmount. But 
ho saw and showed the connection be- 
tween nature and the affections of the 
Boul. 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 in- 
sulate the individual — to surround him 
with barriers of natural respect, so that 
e.ach man shall feel the world as 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, ” 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, which 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 con- 
fidence 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 al- 
ready the tragic consequence. The mind 
of this country, taught to aim at low 
objects, eats upon itself. There is no 
work for any 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 hope- 
ful now crowding to the barriers for the 
career, do oot yet see, that if the single 



MISCELLANIES. 


S35 

man plant himself indomitably on his in- 
stincts, 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 communica- 
tion 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 tlie 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, oufs 
shall not be so. We will walk on our own 
feet ; wo will work with our own hands ; 
we will speak onr own minds. The study 
of letters shall be no longer a name for 
pity, for doubt, and for sensual indalg- 
cnce. The dread of man and the love of 
man shall be a wall of defence 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 mea, 


AN ADDRESS 

Delivered before the Senior class in Divinity College, Cambridge, 
Sunday Evening, July 15, 1838. 


In this refulgent summer it has been a 
luxury to draw the breath of life. The 
grass grows, tlie buds burst, the meadow 
is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of 
flowers. The air is full of birds, and 
sweet with the breath of the pine, the 
balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night 
brings no gloom to the heart with its 
welcome shade. Through the transparent 
darkness the stars pour their almost 
spiritual rays. Man under them seems a 
young child, and his huge globe a toy. 
The cool night bathes the world as with a 
river, and prepares his eyes again for the 
crimson dawn. Tlie mystery of nature 
was never displayed more happily. The 
corn and the wine have been freely dealt 
to all creatures, and the never-broken 
silence with which the old bounty goes 
forward has not yielded yet one word of 
explanation. One is constrained to respect 
the perfection of this world, in which our 
senses converse. How wide ; how rich ; 
what invitation from every property it 
gives to every faculty of man ! In its 
fruitful soils ; in its navigable sea ; in its 
mountains of metal and stone; in its 
forests of all woods ; in its animals ; in its 
chemical ingredients ; in the powers and 
path of light, heat, attraction and life, it 
is well worth the pith and heart of great 
men to subdue and enjoy it. The plan- 
ters, the mechanics, the inventors, the 
astronomers, the builders of cities, and 
the captains, history delights to honour. 

But when the mind opens, and reveals 


the laws which traverse the universe, and 
make things what they are, then shrinks 
the great world at once into a mere illus* 
tration and fable of this mind. What am 
I ? and What is ? asks the human spirit 
with a curiosity now-kindled, but never to 
j be quenched. Behold these out-running 
I laws, which our imperfect apprehension 
can see tend this way and that, but not 
come full circle. Behold these infinite 
relations, so like, so unlike; many, yet 
one. I would study, I would know. I 
would admire for ever. These works of 
thought have been the entertainments of 
the human spirit in all ages. 

A more secret, sweet and overpowering 
beauty appears to man when his heart 
and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. 
Then he is instructed in what is above 
him. He learns that his being is without 
bound ; that, to the good, to the perfect, 
he is born, low as he now lies in evil and 
weakness. That which he venerates is 
still his own, though he has not realized 
it yet. He ought. He knows the sense ot 
that grand word, though his anal3^si3 fails 
entirely to render account of it. When in 
innocency, or when by intellectual percep- 
tion,. he attains to say — “ I love the Right ; 
Trutk is beautiful within and without, for 
evermore. Virtue, I am thine : save me ; 
use me : thee will I serve, day and night, 
in great, in small, that I may be not 
virtuous, but virtue; " — then is the end of 
the creation answeredi and God is wd21 
pleased. 



ADDRESS. 

The sentiment of virtue is a reverence thetruth, and all nature, and all spirits help 
and delight in the presence of certain you with unexpected furtherance. Speak 
divine laws. It perceives that this homely the truth, and all things alive or 
game of life we play covers, under what brute are vouchers, and the very roots of 
seem foolish details, principles that the grass underground there, do seem to 


astonish. The child amidst his baubles 
is learning the action of light, motion, 
gravity, muscular force ; and in the game 
of human life, love, fear, justice, appetite, 
man and God, interact. These laws refuse 
to be adequately stated. They will not 
be written out on paper, or spoken by the 
tongue. They elude our persevering 
thought ; yet we read them hourly in each 
other’s faces, in each other’s actions, in our 
own remorse. The moral trails v/hich are 
all globed into every virtuous act and 
thought — in speech, we must sever, and 
describe or suggest by painful enumera- 
tion of many particulars. Yet, as this 
sentiment is the essence of all religion, 
let mo guide your eye to the precise 
objects of the sentiment, by an enumera- 
tion of some of those classes of facts in 
which this element is conspicuous. 

The intuition of the moral sentiment is 
an insight of the perfection of the laws of 
tlic soul. These laws execute themselves. 
They are out of time, out of space, and 
not subject to circumstance. Thus; in 
the soul of man there is a justice whose 
retributions are instant and entire. He 
who does a good deed, is instantly enno- 
l)led. He who does a mean deed, is by 
the action itself contracted. He who puts 
off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If 
a man is at heart just, then in so far is he 
God; the safety of God, the immortality 
of God, the majesty of God, do enter into 
that man with Justice. If a man dissem- 
ble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes 
out of acquaintance with his own being. 
A man in the view of absolute goodness, 
adores, with total humility. Every step 
so downward, is a step upward. The man 
who renounces himself, comes o himself. 

See how this rapid intrinsic energy 
worketh everywhere, righting wrongs, cor- 
recting appearances, and bringing up facts 
to a harmony with thoughts. Its opera- 
tion in life, though slow to the senses is, at 
last, as sure as in the soul. By it, a man 
is made the Providence to himself, dispens- 
ing’good to his goodness, and evil to his sin. 
Character is always known. Thefts never 
enrich ; alms never impoverish ; murder 
will speak out of stone walls. The least 
admixture of a lie — for example, the taint 
of vanity, the least attempt to make a good 
impression, a favourable appearance — 
mil instantly vitiate the effect, But spsak 


stir and move to bear you witness. See 
again the perfection of the Law as it ap- 
plies itself to the affections, and becomes 
the law of society. As we are, so we asso- 
ciate. The good, by affinity, seek the 
good ; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus 
of their own volition, souls proceed into 
heaven, into hell. 

These facts have always suggested to 
man the sublime creed, that the world is 
not the product of manifold power, but of 
one will, of one mind ; and that one mind 
is everywhere active, in each ray of the 
star, in each wavelet of the pool ; and 
whatever opposes that will is everywhere 
balked and baffled, because things are 
made so, and not otherwise. Good is posi- 
tive. Evil is merely privative, not abso- 
lute; it is like cold, which is the privation 
of heat. All evil is so much death or non- 
entity. Benevolence is absolute and real. 
So much benevolence as a man hath, so 
much life hath he. For all things proceed 
out of this same spirit, which is differently 
named love, justice, temperance, in its 
different applications, just as the ocean re- 
ceives different names on the several shores 
which it washes. All things proceed out 
of the same spirit, and all things conspire 
with it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, ho 
is strong by the whole strength of nature. 
In so far as he roves from these ends, he 
bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries ; 
his being shrinks out of all remote channels, 
he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, 
until absolute badness is absolute death. 

The perception of this law of laws awa- 
kens in the mind a sentiment which we call 
the religious sentiment, and which makes 
our highest happiness. Wonderful is its 
power to charm and to command. It is a 
mountain air. It is the embalmer of the 
\vorld. It is myrrh and storax, and chlo- 
rine and rosemary. It makes the sky and 
the hills sublime, and the silent song of 
the stars is it. By it, is the universe made 
safe and habitable, not by science or 
power. Thought may work cold and in- 
transitive in things, and find no end or 
unity ; but the dawn of the sentiment of 
virtue on the heart gives and is the assur- 
ance that Law is sovereign over all natures; 
and the worlds, time, space, eternity, 
do seem to break out into joy. 

This sentiment is divine and deifying, 

It is the beatitude of tnakes bitn 



MISCELLANIES. 


540 

illimitable. Through it, the soul first 
knows It corrects the capital mis- 

take of the infant man, who seeks to be 
great by following the great, and hopes to 
derive advantages from another— by show- 
ing the fountain of all good to be in him- 
self, and that he, equally with every man, 
is an inlet into the deeps of Reason. 
When he says, " I ought " ; when love 
warms him ; when he chooses, warned 
from on high, the good and great deed ; 
then, deep melodies wander through his 
soul from Supreme Wisdom. Then he 
can worship, and be enlarged by his wor- 
ship ; for ho can never go behind this 
sentiment, In the sublimest flights of the 
soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love 
is never outgrown. 

This sentiment lies at the foundation of 
society, and successively creates all forms 
of worship. The principle of veneration 
never dies out. Man fallen into supersti- 
tion, into sensuality, is never quite without 
the visions of the moral sentiment. In 
like manner, ^all the expressions of this 
sentiment are sacred and permanent in 
proportion to their purity. The expres- 
sions of this sentiment affect us more 
than all other compositions. The sen- 
tences of the oldest time, which ejaculate 
this piety, are still fresh and fragrant. 
This thought dwelled always deepest in 
the minds of men in the devout and con- 
templative East; not alone in Palestine, 
where it reached its purest expression, but 
in Egypt, in Persia, in India, in China. 
Europe has always owned to Oriental 
genius its divine impulses. What these 
holy bards said, all sane men found 
agreeable and true. And the unique 
impression of Jesus upon mankind, whose 
name is not so much written as ploughed 
into the history of this world, is proof of 
"he subtle virtue of this infusion. 

Meantime, whilst the doors of the tem- 
ple stand open, night and day, before 
every man, and the oracles of this truth 
cease never, it is guarded by one stern 
condition : tliis, namely ; it is an intuition. 
It cannot be received at second hand. 
Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but 
provocation, that I can receive from 
another soul. What he announces, I must 
find true in me, or wholly reject ; and on 
his word, or as his second, be he who he 
may, I can accept nothing. On the con- 
trary, the absence of this primary faith is 
the presence of degradation. As is the 
flood, so is the ebb. Let this faith depart, 
and the very words it spake, and the 
things it made, become false and hurtful. 


Then falls the church, the state, art, letters, 
life. The doctrine of the divine nature 
being forgotten, a sickness infects and 
dwarfs the constitution. Once man was 
all ; now he is an appendage, a nuisance. 
And because the indwelling Supreme 
Spirit cannot wholly be got rid of, the doc- 
trine of it suffers this perversion, that the 
divine nature is attributed to one or two 
persons, and denied all the rest, and de- 
nied with fury. The doctrine of inspira- 
tion is lost; the base doctrine of the 
majority of voices usurps the place of the 
doctrine of the soul. Miracles, prophecy, 
poetry; the ideal life, the holy life, exist 
as ancient history merely ; they are not in 
the belief, nor in the aspiration of society ; 
but, when suggested, seem ridiculous. 
Life is comic or pitiful, as soon as the 
high ends of being fade out of sight, and 
man becomes near-sighted, and can only 
attend to what addresses the senses. 

These general views, which, whilst they 
are general, none will contest, find abund- 
ant illustration in the history of religion, 
and especially in the history of the Chris- 
tian Church. In that, all of us have had 
our birth and nurture. The truth con- 
tained in that, you, my young friends, are 
now setting forth to teach. As the Cultus, 
or established worship of the civilized 
world, it has great historical interest fot 
us. Of its blessed words, which have 
been the consolation of humanity, you 
need not that I should speak. I shall en- 
deavour to discharge my duty to you, on 
this occasion, by pointing out two errors 
in its administration, which daily appear 
more gross from the point of view we have 
just taken. 

I Jesus Christ belonged to the true race 
of prophets. He saw with open eye the 
mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe 
harmony, ravished with its beauty, he 
lived in it, and had his being there. Alone 
in all history, he estimated the greatness 
of man. One man was true to what is in 
you and me. He saw that God incarnates 
himself in man, and evermore goes forth 
anew to take possession of his world. Ha 
said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, 

‘ I am divine. Through me, God acts ; 
through me, speaks. Would you see God, 
see me ; or, see thee, when thou also 
thinkest as I now think.’ But what a dis- 
tortion did his doctrine and memory suffer 
in the same, in the next, and the following 
ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason 
which will bear to be taught by the Under- 
standing. The understanding caught this 
high Qhant from the poet's lipst ^ 



ADDRESS. 


la the next age, * This was Jehovah come 
down out of heaven. I will kill you, if 
you say he was a man.’ The idioms of his 
language, and the hgures of his rhetoric, 
have usurped the place of his truth ; and 
churches are not built on his principles, 
but on his tropes. Christianity became a 
Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece 
and of Egypt, before. Ho spoke of mira- 
cles : for he felt that man’s life was a 
miracle, and all that man doth, and he 
knew that his daily miracle shines, as the 
character ascends. But the word Miracle, 
as pronounced by Christian churches, 
gives a false impression ; it is Monster. 
It is not one with the blowing clover and I 
the falling rain. ; 

lie felt respect for Moses and the pro- 
phets ; but no unfit tenderness at post- 
poning their initial revelations, to the 
hour and the man that now is ; to the 
eternal revelation in the heart. Thus was 
he a true man. Having seen that the law 
in us is commanding he would not suffer 
ft to be commanded. Boldly, with hand 
and heart, and life, he declared it was 
God. Thus is he, as I think, the only 
fioul in history who has appreciated the 
«vorth of a man. 

i« In this point of view we become very 
sensible of the first defect of historical 
Christianity. Historical Christianity has 
fallen into the error tliat corrupts all at- 
tempts to communicate religion. As it 
appears to us, and as it has appeared for 
ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul, but 
an exaggeration of the personal, the posi- 
tive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells, 
with noxious exaggeration about the Per- 
S 07 t of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. 
It invites every man to expand to the full 
circle of the universe, and will have no 
preferences but those of spontaneous 
love. But by this eastern monarchy of a 
Christianity, which indolence and fear 
have built, the friend of man is made the 
injurer of man. The manner in which his 
name is surrounded with expressions, 
which were once sallies of admiration and 
love, but are now petrified into official 
titles, kills all generous sympathy and 
liking. All who hear me, feel that the 
language that describes Christ to Europe 
and America, is not the stylo of friendship 
and enthusiasm to a good and noble heart, 
but is appropriated and formal — paints a 
demi-god as the Orientals or the Greeks 
would describe Osiris and Apollo. Ac- 
cept the injurious impositions of our 
early catechetical instruction, and even 
bone&ty and sell-denial were but splezKlid 


341 

sins, if they did not wear the Christian 
name. One would rather be 

A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,’* 

than to be defrauded of his manly right in 
coming into nature, and finding not names 
and places, not land and professions, but 
even virtue and truth foreclosed and 
monopolized. You shall not be a man 
even. You shall not own the world; you 
shall not dare, and live after the infinite 
Law that is in you, and in company with 
the infinite Beauty which heaven and 
earth reflect to you in all lovely forms ; 
but you must subordinate your nature to 
Christ’s nature ; you must accept our 
interpretations: and take his portrait as 
the vulgar draw it. 

That is always best which gives me to 
myself. The sublime is excited in me by 
the great stoical doctrine. Obey thyself. 
That which shows God in me, fortifies me. 
That which shows God out of me, makes 
me a wart and a wen. There is no longer 
a necessary reason for my being. Already 
the long shadows of untimely oblivion 
creep over me, and I shall decease for 
ever. 

The divine bards are the friends of my 
virtue, of my intellect, of my strength. 
They admonish me, that the gleams which 
flash across my mind, are not mine, but 
God’s; that they had the like, and were 
not disobedient to the heavenly vision. 
So I love them. Noble provocations go 
out from them, inviting me to resist evil ; 
to subdue the world ; and to Be. And 
thus by his holy thoughts, Jesus serves us, 
and thus only. To aim to convert a man 
by miracles, is a profanation of the soul. 
A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, 
as always, to be made, by the reception of 
beautiful sentiments. It is true that a 
great and rich soul, like his, falling among 
the simple, does so preponderate, that, as 
his did, it names the world. The world 
seems to them to exist for him, and they 
have not yet drunk so deeply of his sense, 
as to see that only by coming again to 
themselves, or to God in themselves can 
they grow forevermore. It is a low benefit 
to give me something ; it is a high benefit 
to enable me to do somewhat of myself. 
The time is coming when all men will see, 
that the gift of God to the soul is not • 
vaunting, overpowering, excluding sanc- 
tity, but a sweet, natural goodness, a good- 
ness like thine and mine, and that so 
invites thine and mine to be and to grow. 

The injustice of the vulgar tone of 

preaching is not less flagrant to Jesu^ 



MISCELLANIES. 


34a 

rhan to the souls which it profanes. The 
preachers do not see that they make his 
gospel not glad, and shear him of the locks 
of beauty and the attributes of heaven. 
When I see a majestic Kpaminondas, or 
Washington ; when I see among my con- 
temporaries, a true orator, an upright 
judge, a dear friend; when I vibrate to 
the melody and fancy of a poem ; I see 
beauty that is to be desired. And so 
lovely, and with yet more entire consent 
of my human being, sounds in rny ear the 
severe music of the bards that have sung 
of the true God in all ages. Now do not 
degrade the life and dialogues of Christ 
out of the circle of this charm, by insula- 
tion and peculiarity. Let them lie as they 
befell, alive and warm, part of human life, 
and of the landscape, and of the cheerful 
day. 

2. The second defect of the traditionary 
and limited way of using the jtnind of 
Christ is a consequence of the first; this, 
namely; that the Moral Nature, that Law 
of laws, whose revelations introduce 
greatness — yea, God himself, into the 
open soul, is not explored as the fountain 
of the established teaching in society. 
Men have come to speak of the revelation 
as somewhat long ago given and done, as 1 
if God were dead. The injury to faith I 
throttles the preacher ; and the goodliest 1 
of institutions becomes an uncertain and 
inarticulate voice. 

It is very certain that it is the effect of 
conversation with the beauty of the soul, 
to beget a desire and need to impart to 
others the same knowledge and love. If 
utterance is denied, the thought lies like 
a burden on the man. Always the seer is 
a sayer. Somehow his dream is told : 
somehow he publishes it with solemn joy ; 
sometimes with pencil on canvas ; some- 
times with chisel on stone ; sometimes in 
towers and aisles of granite, his soul’s 
worship isbuilded; sometimes in anthems 
of indefinite music ; but clearest and most 
permanent, in words. 

The man enamoured of this excellency, 
becomes its priest or poet. The office is 
coeval with the world. But observe the 
condition, tho spiritual limitation of the 
office. The spirit only can teach. Not 
any profane man, not any sensual, not any 
liar, not any slave can teach, but only he 
can give, who has ; he only can create, 
who is. The man on whom the soul 
descends, through whom the soul speaks, 
alone can teach. Courage, piety, love, 
wisdom, can teach ; and every man can 
C^en his door to these angels, and they 


i shall bring him the gif . of tongues, Bui 
the man who aims to speak as books enable, 
as synods use, as the fashion guides, and 
as interest commands, babbles. Let him 
hush. 

To this holy office you propose to devote 
yourselves. I wish you may feel your call 
ill throbs of desire and hope. The office 
is the first in the world. It is of that 
reality that it cannot suffer the deduction 
of any falsehood. And it is my duty to 
say to yqu, that the need was never greater 
of new revelation ,’than now. From the 
views I have already expressed, you will 
infer the sad conviction, which I share, I 
believe, with numbers, of the universal 
decay and now almost death of faith in 
society. The soul is not preached. The 
Church seems to totter to its fall, almost 
all life extinct. On this occasion, any 
complaisance would be criminal, which 
told you, whose hope and commission it is 
to preach the faith of Christ, that the faith 
of Christ is preached. 

Itistime that this ill-suppressed murmur 
of all thoughtful men against the famine 
of our churches ; this moaning of the heart 
because it is bereaved of the consolation, 
the hope, the grandeur, that come alone 
out of the culturo of the moral nature ; 
should be heard through the sleep of 
indolence, and over the din of routine. 
This great and perpetual office of the 
preacher is not discharged. Preaching i.'t 
the expression of the moral sentiment ia 
application to the duties of life. In how 
many churches, by how many prophets, 
tell me, is man made sensible that he is an 
infinate Soul ; that the earth and heavens 
are passing into his mind ; that he is 
drinking forever the Soul of God ; Where 
now sounds the persuasion, that by its 
very melody imparadises my heart, and so 
affirms its own origin in heaven ? Whera 
shall I hear words such as in elder ages 
drew men to leave all and follow- father 
and mother, house and land, wife and 
child ? Where shall I hear these augusfi 
laws of moral being so pronounced, as to 
fill my ear, and I feel ennobled by the offer 
of my uttermost action and passion ? The 
test of the true faith, certainly, should be 
itspe ;er to charm and command the soul, 
as the laws of nature control the activity 
of the hands — so commanding that wo 
find pleasure and honour in obeying. Tho 
faith should blend with the light of rising 
and of setting suns, with the flying cloud, 
the singing bird, and the breath of flowers. 
But now the priest’s Sabbath has lost the 
splendour of nature ; It is unlovely ; we are 



ADDRESS. 


glad when it is done ; we can make, we do 
make, even sitting in our pews, a far 
better, holier, sweeter, for ourselves. 

Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a 
formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded 
and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as 
the prayers begin, which do not uplift, but 
smite and offend us. We are fain to wrap 
our cloaks about us, and secure, as best 
we can, a solitude that hears not. I once 
heard a preacher who sorely tempted me 
to say I would go to church no more. 
Men go, thought I, where they are wont 
to go, else had no soul entered the temple 
in the afternoon. A snow-storm was 
falling around us. The snow-storm was 
real ; the preacher merely spectral ; and 
the eye felt the sad contrast in looldng at 
him, and then out of the window behind 
him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow. 
He had lived in vain. He had no one 
word intimating that he had laughed or 
wept, was married or in love, had been 
commended, orcheated, or chagrined. If 
he had ever lived and acted, we were none 
the wiser for it. The capital secret of his 
profession, namely, to convert life into 
truth, he had not learned. Not one fact in 
all his experience had lie yet imported into 
his doctrine. This man had plouglied, and ' 
planted, and talked, and bought, and sold ; 
he had read books ; he had eaten and 
drunken; his head aches; his hearty 
throbs ; he smiles and suffers ' yet was | 
there not a surmise, a liirit, in all the 
discourse, that he had ever lived at all. 
Not a line did he draw out of real history. 
The true preacher can bo known by this, 
that he deals out to the people his life — 
life passed tlirough the fire of thought. 
But of the bad preacher, it could not be 
told from his sermon, what age of the 
world he fell in ; whether he had a father 
or a child ; whether he was a freeholder 
or a pauper ; whether h43 was a citizen or 
a countryman ; or any other fact of his 
biography. It seemed strange that the 
people should come to church. It seemed 
as if their houses were very unentertain- 
ing, that they should prefer this thought- 
less clamour. It shows that there is a 
commanding attraction in the moral 
sentiment, that can lend a faint tint of 
light to dulness and ignorance, coming in 
its name and place. The good hearer is 
sure he has been touched sometimes ; is 
Bure there ia somewhat to be reached, and 
some word that can reach it. When he 
listens to these vain words, he comforts 
bitnself by their relation to his remem-* 


343 

brance of better hours, and so they clatter 
and echo unchallenged. 

I am not ignorant that when we preach 
unworthily, it is not always quite in vain. 
There is a good ear, in some men, that 
draws supplies to virtue out of very in- 
different nutriment. There is poetic truth 
concealed in all the commonplaces of 
prayer and of sermons, and though fool- 
ishly spoken, they may be wisely heard ; 
for, each is some select expression that 
broke out in a moment of piety from 
some stricken or jubilant soul, and its ex- 
cellency made it remembered. The 
prayers and even the dogmas of cur 
church are like the zodiac of Donderali, 
and the astronomical monuments of the 
Hindoos, wholly insulated from anything 
now extant in the life and business of the 
people. They mark the height to which 
the waters once rose. But this docility is 
a check upon the mischief from the good 
and devout. In a large portion of the 
community, the religious service gives 
rise to quite other thoughts and emotions. 
We need not chide the negligent servant. 
We are struck with pity, rather, at the 
swift retribution of his sloth. Alas for 
the unhappy man that is called to stand 
in the pulpit, and not give bread of life. 
Everything that befalls, accuses him. 
Would ho ask contributions for the mis- 
sions, foreign or domestic ? Instantly his 
face is suffused with shame, to propose to 
his parish, that they should send money a 
hundred or a thousand miles, to furnish 
such poor fare as they have at home, and 
would do well to go the hundred or the 
thousand miles to escape. Would ha 
urge people to a godly way of living ; and 
can he ask a fellow-creaturo to come to 
vSabbath meetings, when he and they all 
know what is the poor uttermost they can 
hope for therein ? Will he invite them 
privately to the Lord’s supper ? He dares 
not. If no heart warm this rite, the hollow, 
dry, creaking formality is too plain, than 
that he can face a man of wit and energy, 
and put the invitation without terror. In 
the street, what has he to say to the bold 
village blasphemer ? The village blas- 
pliciner sees tor in the face, form, and 
gait of the minister. 

Let me not taint the sincerity of this 
plea by any oversight of the claims of good 
men. I know and honour the purity and 
strict conscience of numbers of the clergy. 
What life the public worship retains, it 
owes to the scattered company of pious 
men, who minister here and there in the 
churches, and who, sometimes accepting 



MISCELLANIES 


344 

irith too great tenderness the tenet of the 
elders, have not accepted from others, but 
from their own heart, the genuine im- 
pulses of virtue, and so still command 
our love and awe, to the sanctity of char- 
acter. Moreover the exceptions are not 
BO much to be found in a few eminent 
preachers, as in the better hours, the truer 
inspirations of all— nay, in the sincere 
moments of every man. But with what- 
ever exception, it is still true, that tradi- 
tion characterizes the preaching of this 
country ; that it comes out of the memory, 
and not out of the soul; that it aims 
at what is usual, and not at what is neces- 
sary and eternal ; that thus historical 
Christianity destroys the power of preach- 
ing, by withdrawing it from the explora- 
tion of the moral nature of man, where 
the sublime is, where are the resources of 
astonishment and power. What a cruel 
injustice it is to that Law, the joy of the 
whole earth, which alone can make 
thought dear and rich ; that Law whose 
fatal sureness the astronomical orbits 
poorly emulate, that it is travestied and 
depreciated, that it is behooted and be- 
howled, and not a trait, not a word of it 
articulated. The pulpit in loosing sight of 
this Law, loses its reason, and gropes after 
it knows not what. And for want of this 
culture, the soul of the community is 
sick and faithless. It wants nothing so 
much as a stern, high, stoical, Christian 
discipline, to make it know itself and the 
divinity that speaks through it. Now man 
is ashamed of himself ; he skulks and 
sneaks through the world, to be tolerated, 
to be pitied, and scarcely in a thousand 
years docs any man dare to be wise and 
good, and so draw after him the tears and 
blensings of his kind. 

Certainly there have been periods when, 
from the inactivity of the intellect on cer- 
tain truths, a greater faith was possible in 
names and persons. The Puritians in 
England and America, found in the Christ 
of the Catholic Church, and in the dogmas 
inherited from Rome, scope for their 
austere piety, and their longings for civil 
freedom. But their creed is passing away, 
and none arises in its room. I think no 
man can go with his thoughts about him, 
into one of our churches, without feeling, 
that what hold the public worship had on 
men is gone, or going. It has lost its 
grasp on the affection of the good, and 
the fear of the bad. In the country 
neighbourhoods, half parishes are signing \ 
off— to use the local term. It is already i 
begioaiDg tQ character and reli- 1 


gion to withdraw from the religious meet* 
ings. I have heard a devout person, who 
prized the Sabbath, say in bitterness of 
heart, “ On Sundays, it seems wicked to 
go to church." And the motive that holds 
the best there, is now only a hope and a 
! waiting. What was once a mere circum- 
stance, that the best and the worst men 
in the parish, the poor and the rich, the 
learned and the ignorant, young and old, 
should meet one day as fellows in one 
house, in sign of an equal right in the 
soul — has come to be a paramount motive 
for going thither. 

My friends, in these two errors, I think, 
I find the causes of a decaying church and 
a wasting unbelief. And what greater 
calamity can fall upon a nation than the 
loss of worship ? Then all things go to 
decay. Genius leaves the temple, to haunt 
the senate, or the market. Literature 
becomes frivolous. Science is cold. The 
eye of youth is not lighted by the hope of 
other worlds, and age is without honour. 
Society lives to trifles, and when men die, 
we do not mention them. 

And now, my brothers, you will ask, 
What in these desponding days can be 
done by us ? The remedy is already 
declared in the ground of our complaint of 
the Church. We have contrasted the 
Church with the Soul. In the soul, then, 
let the redemption be sought. Wherever 
a man comes, there comes revolution. 
The old is for slaves. When a man cornea 
all books are legible, all things transpar- 
ent, all religions are forms. Ho is 
religious. Man is the wonder-worker, 
lie IS seen amid miracles. All men blcsa 
and curse. He saith yea and nay, only. 
The stationariness of religion ; the 
assumption that the ago of inspiration is 
past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of 
degrading the character of Jesus by repre- 
senting him as a man ; indicate with suffi- 
cient clearness the falsehood of our 
theology. It is the office of a true teacher 
to show us that God is, not was ; that ha 
speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity 
— a faith like Christ’s in the infinitude of 
man — is lost. None believeth in the soul 
of man, but only in some man or person 
old a’li departed. Ah me ! no man goeth 
alone. All men go in flocks to this saint 
or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth 
in secret ; they cannot see in secret ; they 
love to be blind in public. They think 
society wiser than their soul, and know 
not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser 
than the whole world. Sea how nations 
aoa flit QO Uiq ^ 9 , 9i tvmei biimI 



ADDRESS. 345 


leave no ripple to tell where they floated 
or sunk, and one good soul shall make the 
name of Moses, or of Zeno, or of Zoro- 
aster, reverend forever. None assayeth 
the stern ambition to be the Self of the 
nation, and of nature, but each would be 
an easy secondary to some Christian 
scheme, or sectarian connection, or some 
eminent man. Once leave your own 
knowledge of God, your own sentiment, 
and take secondary knowledge, as St. 
Paul’s, or George Fox's, or Swedenborg’s, 
and you get wide from God with every 
year this secondary form lasts, and if, as 
now, for centuries — the chasm yawns to 
that breadth, that men can scarcely be 
convinced there is in them anything divine. 

Let me admonish you, first of all^ to go 
alone ;'to refuse the good models, even those 
which are sacred in the imaginatian of 
men, and dare to love God without media- 
tor or veil. Friends enough you shall find 
who will hold up to your emulation 
Wesleys and Oberlins, Saints and 
Prophets. Thank God for these good men, 
but say, ‘I also am a man.’ Imitation 
cannot go above its model. The imitator 
dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. 
The inventor did it, because it was natural 
to him, aud so in him it has a charm. In 
the imitator, something else is natural, 
and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, 
to come short of another man’s. 

Yourself a new-born bard of the Holy 
Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, 
and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. 
Look to it first and only, that fashion, 
custom, authority, pleasure, and money 
are nothing to you— are not bandages over 
your eyes, that you cannot see— but live 
with the privilege of the immeasurable 
mind, Not too anxious to visit periodi- 
cally all families and each family in your 
parish connection; when you meet one 
of these men or v/omen, be to them a 
divine man ; be to them thought and vir- 
tue ; let their timid aspirations find in you 
a friend ; let their trampled instincts be 
genially tempted out in your atmosphere ; 
let their doubts know that you have 
doubted, and their wonder feel that you 
have wondered. By trusting your own 
heart, ycu shall gain more confidence in 
other mea- For all our penny-wisdom, [for 
all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it 
is not to be doubted, that all men have 
sublime thoughts ; that all men value the 
few real hours of life; they love to be 
heard ; they love to be caught up into the 
vision of principles. We mark with light 
of the memory the few intervi^we we have 


had, in the dreary years of routine and ol 
sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; 
that spoke what we thought ; that told us 
what we knew ; that gave us leave lo be 
what we inly were. Discharge to men 
the priestly office, and, present or absent, 
you shall be followed with their love as. by 
an angel. 

And, to this end, let us not aim at com- 
mon degrees of merit. Can we not leave, 
to such as love it, the virtue that glitters 
for the commendation of society, and our- 
selves pierce the deep solitudes of abso» 
lute ability and worth ? We easily come 
up to the standard of goodness in society. 
Society’s praise can be cheaply secured, 
and almost all men are content with those 
easy merits ; but the instant effect of con- 
versing with God, will be to put them 
away. There are persons who are not 
actors, not speakers, but influences ; per- 
sons too great for fame, for display ; who 
disdain eloquence ; to whom all we call 
art and artist, seems too nearly allied to 
show and by-ends, to the exaggeration of 
the finite and selfish, and loss of the 
universal. The orators, the poets, the 
commanders encroach on us only as fair 
women do, by our allowance and homage. 
Slight them by preoccupation of mind, 
slight them, as you can well afford to do, 
by high and universal aims, and they in- 
stantly feel that you liave right, and that 
it is in lower places that they must shine. 
They also feel your right ; for they with 
you are open to the influx of the all- 
knowing Spirit, which annihilates before 
its broad noon the little shades and grada- 
tions of intelligence in the compositions 
we call wiser and wisest. 

In such high communion, let us study 
the grand strokes of rectitude; a bold 
benevolence, an independence of friends, 
so that not the unjust wishes of those who 
love us, shall impair our freedom, but wa 
shall resist for truth’s sake the freest flow 
of kindness, and appeal to sympathies far 
in advance ; and — what is the highest 
form in which we know this beautiful 
element— a certain solidity of merit, that 
has nothing to do with opinion, and which 
is so essentially and manifestly virtue, 
that it is taken for granted, that the right, 
the brave, the generous step will be taken 
by it, and nobody thinks of commending 
it. You would compliment a coxcomb 
doing a good act, but you would not praise 
an angel. The silence that accepts merit 
as the most natural thing in the world, 
is the highest applause. Such souls* 
wh^n tbey appear, are the Imperial Guard 



MISCELLANIES. 


346 

of Virtue, the perpetual reserve, the dic- 
tators of fortune. One needs not praise 
their courage — they are the heart and 
soul of nature. O my friends, there are 
resources in us on which we have not 
drawn. There are men who rise refreshed 
on hearing a threat; men to whom a 
crisis which intimidates and paralyzes 
the majority — demanding not the facul- 
ties of prudence and thrift, but comprehen- 
sion, immovableness, the readiness of 
sacrifice — comes graceful and beloved as 
a bride. Napoleon said of Massena, that 
he was not himself until the battle began 
to go against him ; then, when the dead 
began to fall in ranks around him, awoke 
his powers of combination, and he put on 
terror and victory as a robe. So it is in 
rugged crises, in uiiweariable endurance, 
and in aims which put sympathy out of 
question, that the angel is shown. But 
these are heights that we can scarce re- 
member and look up to, without con- 
trition and shame. Let us thank God 
that such things exist. 

And now let us do what we can to re- 
kindle the smouldering, nigh quenched 
fire on the altar. The evils of the church 
that now is are manifest. The question 
returns. What shall we do ? I confess, 
all attempts to project and establish a 
Cultus with new rites and forms, seem 
to me vain. Faith makes us, and not we 
it, and faith makes its own forms. All at- 
tempts to contrive a system are as cold as 
the new worship introduced by the French 
to the goddess of Reason — to-day, paste- 
board and filigree, and ending to-morrow 
in madness and murder. Rather let the 
breath of new life bo breathed by you 
through the forms already existing. For, 
if once you are alive you shall find they 
shall become plastic and new. The re- 
medy to their deformity is, first, soul, and 


second soul, and evermore, soul. A whole 
popedom of forms, one pulsation 3f virtue 
can uplift and vivify. Two inestimable 
advantages Christianity has given us: 
first, the Sabbath, the jubilee of the whole 
world ; whose light dawns welcome alike 
into the closet of the philosopher, into 
the garret of toil, and into prison cells, 
and everywhere suggests, even to the 
vile, the dignity of spiritual being. Let 
it stand for evermore, a temple, which 
new love, new faith, new sight shall re- 
store to more than its first splendour to 
mankind. And secondly, the institution 
of preaching — the speech of man to men — 
essentially the most flexible of all organs, 
of all forms. What hinders that now, 
everywhere, in pulpits, in lecture-rooms, 
in houses, in fields, wherever the invita- 
tion of men or your own occasions lead 
you, you speak the very truth, as your 
life and conscience teach it, and cheer 
the waiting, fainting hearts of men with 
new hope and new revelation ? 

I look for the hour when that supreme 
Beauty, which ravished the souls of those 
Eastern men, and chiefly of those He- 
brews, and through their lips spoke ora- 
cles to all time, shall speak in the West 
also. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures 
contain immortal sentences, that have 
been bread of life to millions. But they 
have no epical integrity ; are fragmen- 
tary ; are not shown in their order to the 
intellect. I look for the new Teacher, 
that shall follow so far those shining laws, 
that he shall see them come full circle ; 
shall see their rounding complete grace ; 
shall see the world to be the mirror of 
the soul ; shall see the identity of tho 
law of gravitation with purity of heart ; 
and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, 
is one thing with Science, with Beauty, 
and with Joy, 


LITERARY ETHICS. 

An Oration Delivered before the Literary Societies of 
Dartmouth College, July 24, 1838. 


Gentlemen : — 

The invitation to address you this day, 
with which you have honoured me, was a 
call so welcome, that I made haste to 
obey it. A summons to celebrate with 
S3holars a literary festival, is so alluring 
to me, as to overcome the doubts I might 
eisa entertain of my ability to bring you 
any thought worthy of your attention, 1 


have reached the middle age of man ; yet 
I believe I am not less glad or sanguine at 
the meeting of scholars, than when a boy, 
I first saw the graduates of my own 
College assembled at their anniversary. 
Neither years nor books have yet availed 
to extirpate a prejudice then rooted in 
me, that a scholar is the favourite of 
Heaven and earth, the excellency of hif 



LITERARY ETHICS. 


couatfy the happiest of men. His duties 
lead him directly into the holy ground 
where other men’s aspirations only point. 
His successes are occasions of the purest 
joy to all men. Eyes is lie to the blind ; 
feet is he to the lame. His failures, if he 
is worthy, are inlets to higher advantages. 
And because the scholar, by every thought 
he thinks, extends his dominion into the 
general mind of men, he is not one, but 
many. The few scholars in each country, 
whose genius I know, seem to me not in- 
dividuals, but societies ; and when events 
occur of great import, I count over these 
representatives of opinion, whom they 
will affect, as if I were counting nations. 
And, even if his results were incommuni- 
cable, if they abode in his own spirit, the 
intellect hath somewhat so sacred in its 
possessions, that the fact of his existence 
and pursuits would be a happy omen. 

Meantime I know that a very different 
estimate of the scholar’s profession pre- 
vails in this country, and the importunity, 
with which society presses its claim upon 
young men, tends to pervert the views of 
the youth in respect to the culture of the 
intellect. Hence the historical failure, on 
which Europe and America have so freely 
commented. This country has not ful- 
filled what seemed the reasonable expec- 
tation of mankind, Men looked, when 
all feudal straps and bandages were 
snapped asunder, that nature, too long 
the mother of dwarfs, should reimburse 
itself by a brood of Titans, who should 
laugh and leap in the continent, and run 
up the mountains of the West with the 
erimnd of genius and of love. But the 
mark of American merit in painting, in 
sculpture, in poetry, in fiction, in 
eloquence, seems to be a certain grace 
without grandeur, and itself not new but 
derivative ; a vase of fair outline, but 
empty — which whoso sees, may fill with 
what wit and character is in him, but 
which does not, like the charged cloud, 
overllow with terrible beauty, and emit 
lightnings on all beholders. 

I will not lose myself in the desultory 
questions, what are the limitations, and 
what the causes of the fact. It suffices 
me to say, in general, that the diffidence 
of mankind in the soul has crept over the 
American mind ; that men here, as else- 
where, are indisposed to innovation, and 
prefer any antiquity, any usage, any 
livery productive of ease or profit, to the 
unproductive service of thought. 

Yet, in every sane hour, the service of 
thought appears reasonable, the depotism 


’ of the senses insane. The scholar may 
lose himself in schools, in words, and 
become a pedant : but when he compre* 
hends his duties, he above all men is a 
realist, and converses with things. For, 
the scholar is the student of the world 
and of what worth the world is, and with 
what emphasis it accosts the soul of man- 
such is the worth, such the call of tha 
scholar. 

The want of the times, and the pro- 
priety of this anniversary, concur to draw 
attention to the doctrine of Literary 
Ethics. What I have to say on that 
doctrine distributes itself under the topics 
of the resources, the subject, and tha 
discipline of the scholar. 

I. The resources of the scholar are 
proportioned to his confidence in tha 
attributes of the Intellect. The resources 
of the scholar are coextensive with nature 
and truth, yet can never be his, unless 
claimed by him with an equal greatness 
of mind. He cannot know them until he 
has beheld with awe the infinitude and 
impersonality of the intellectual power. 
When he has seen that it is not his, nor 
any man’s, but that it is the soul which 
made the world, and that it is all accessi- 
ble to him, he will know that he, as its 
minister, may rightfully hold all things 
subordinate and answerable to it. A divine 
pilgrim in nature, ail things attend his 
steps. Over him stream the flying con- 
stellations; over him streams Time, as 
they, scarcely divided into months and 
years. He inhales the year as a vapour ; 
its fragrant midsummer breath, its spark- 
ling January heaven. And so pass into 
his mind, in bright transfiguration, the 
grand events of history, to take a new 
order and scale from him. He is tha 
world ; and the epochs and heroes of 
chronology are pictorial images, in which 
his thoughts are told. There is no event 
but sprung somewhere from the soul of 
man ; and therefore there is none but the 
soul of man can interpret. Every pre- 
sentiment of the mind is executed some- 
where in a gigantic fact. What else is 
Greece, Rome, England, France, St. 
Helena ? What else are churches, litera- 
tures, empires ? The new man must feel 
that he is new, and has not come into the 
world mortgaged to the opinions and 
usages of Europe, and Asia, and Egypt. 
The sense of Spiritual independence it 
like the lovely varnish of the dew, where- 
by the old, hard, peaked earth, and its old 
self-same productions, are made 



MISCELLANIES. 


348 

ev^ry morning, and shining with !the I 
last touch of the artist’s hand. A false 
humility, a complaisance to reigning 
schools, or to the wisdom of antiquity, 1 
must not defraud me of supreme posses- 
sion of this hour. If any person have ' 
less love of liberty, and less jealousy to 
guard his integrity, shall he therefore 
dictate to you and me ? Say to such 
doctors. We are thankful to you," as we 
are to history, to the pyramids and the 
authors; but now our day is come ; we 
have been born out of the eternal silence ; 
and now will v/e live — live for ourselves — 
and not as the pall-bearers of a funeral, 
but as the upholders and creators of our ! 
age ; and neither Greece nor Rome, nor 
the three Unities of Aristotle, nor the 
three Kings of Cologne, nor the College 
of the Sorbonne, nor the Edinburgh 
Revi$w^ is to command any longer. Now 
that we are here, we will put our own 
interpretation on things, and our own 
things for interpretation. Please hirnself 
with complaisance who will— for me things 
must take my scale, not I theirs. I will 
say with the warlike king, “ God gave me 
this crown, and the whole world shall not 
take it away.” 

The whole value of history, of biography, 
fs to increase my self-trust, by demon- 
strating what man can be and do. This is 
the moral of the Plutarchs, the Cudworths, 
the Tennemanns, who give us the story 
of men or of opinions. Any history of 
philosophy fortifies my faith, by showing 
me that what high dogmas I had supposed 
were the rare and late fruit of a cumula- 
tive culture, and only now possible to 
gome recent Kant or Fichte, were the 
prompt improvisations of the earliest 
inquirers; of Parmenides, Heraclitus, j 
and Xenophanes. In view of these 
students, the soul seems to whisper, 
“There is a better way than this in- 
dolent learning of another. Leave rne 
alone ; do not teach me out of Leibnitz 
or Schelling, and I shall find it all out 
myself.” 

Still more do we owe to biography the 
fortification of our hope. If you would 
know the power of character, see how 
much you would impoverish the world, if 
you could take clean out of history the 
lives of Milton, Shakespeare, and Plato, 
these three, and cause them not to be. 
See you not how much less the power of 
man would be ? I console myself in the 
poverty of my thoughts; in the paucity 
of great men, in the malignity and dulness 
of the cations, by falling back on these 


sublime recollections, and seeing what the 
prolific soul could beget on actual nature ; 
seeing that Plato was, and Shakespeare, 
and Milton, three irrefragable facts. 
Then I dare; I also will essay to be. 
The humblest, the most hopeless, in 
view of these radiant facts, may no\f 
theorise and hope. In spite of all thi 
rueful abortions that squeak and gibber 
in the street, in spite of slumber and 
guilt, in spite of the army, the bar-room, 
and the jail, have been these glorious 
manifestations of the mind ; and I will 
thank my great brothers so truly for the 
admonition of their being, as to endeavour 
also to be just and brave, to aspire and to 
speak. Plotinus too, and Spinoza, and 
the immortal bards of philosophy — that 
which they have written out with patient 
courage, makes me bold. No more will I 
dismiss, with haste, the visions which 
flash and sparkle across my sky; but 
observe them, approach them, domesticate 
them, brood on them, and draw out of the 
past genuine life for the present hour. 

To feel the full value of these lives, as 
occasions of hope and provocation, you 
must come to know, that each admirable 
genius is but a successful diver in that sea 
whose floor of pearls is all your own. The 
impoverishing philosophy of ages has laid 
stress on the distinctions of the indi- 
vidual, and not on the universal attri- 
butes of man. The youth, intoxicated 
with his admiration of a hero, fails to see 
that it is only a projection of his own soul 
v/hich he admires. In solitude, in a re- 
mote village, the ardent youth loiters and 
mourns. With inflamed eye in this sleep- 
ing wilderness, he has read the story of 
the Emperor Charles the Fifth, until his 
fancy has brought home to the surround- 
ing woods, the faint roar of cannonades 
in the Milanese, and marches in Germany, 
He is curious concerning that man’s day. 
What filled it ? the crowded orders, the 
stern decisions, the foreign despatches, 
the Castilian etiquette ? The soul answers 
— Behold his day here ! In the sighing 
of these woods, in the quiet of these gray 
fields, in the cool breeze that sings out ol 
these northern mountains ; in the work- 
men, the boys, the maidens, you meet — 
in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of 
noon, and sauntering of the afternoon ; 
in the disquieting comparisons : in the 
regrets at want of vigour ; in the great 
idea, and the puny execution — behold 
Charles the Fifth’s day : another, yet Iho 
same : behold Chatham’s, Hampden’s, 
Bayard’s, Alfred’s, Scipfo’s, Pericle’s daf 



LITERARY ETHICS. 


i-day 6f all that are born of women. The 
difference of circumstance is merely cos- 
tume. I am tasting the self-same life — 
its sweetness, its greatness, its pain, which 
I so admire in other men. Do not foolish- 
ly ask of the inscrutable, obliterated past, 
what it cannot tell— the details of that 
nature, of that day, called Byron, or Burke 
— but ask it of the enveloping Now ; the 
more quaintly you inspect its evanescent 
beauties, its wonderful details, it spiritual 
causes, its astounding whole — so much the 
more you master the biography of this 
hero, and that, and every hero. Be lord 
of a day, through wisdom and justice, and 
you can put up your history books. 

An intimation of these broad rights is 
familiar in the sense of injury which men 
feel in the assumption of any man to 
limit their possible progress. We resent 
all criticism, which denies us anything 
that lies in our line of advance. Say to 
the man of letters, that he cannot paint a 
Transfiguration, or build a steamboat, or 
be a grand-marshal— and he will not seem 
to himself depreciated. But deny to him 
any quality of literary or metaphysical 
power, and he is piqued. Concede to him 
genius, which is a sort of Stoical plenum 
annulling the comparative, and he is con- 
tent; but concede him talents never so 
rare, denying him genius, and he is ag- 
grieved. What does this mean ? Why 
simply, that the soul has assurance, by in- 
stincts and presentiments, of all power in 
the direction of its ray, as well as of the 
special skills it has already acquired. 

In order to a knowledge of the resources 
of the scholar, we must not rest in the 
use of slender accomplishments — of 
faculties to do this and that other feat 
with words ; but we must pay our vows to 
the highest power, and pass, if it be pos- 
sible, by assiduous love and watching, 
into the visions of absolute truth. The 
growth of the intellect is strictly analogous 
in all individuals. It is larger reception. 
Able men, in general, have good disposi- 
tions, and a respect for justice ; because 
an able man is nothing else than a good, 
free, vascular organisation, whereinto the 
universal spirit freely flows ; so that his 
fund of justice is not only vast, but in- 
finite, All men, in the abstract, are just 
and good; what hinders them, in the par- 
ticular, is, the momentary predominance 
of the finite and individual over the 
general truth, The condition of our in- 
carnation in a private self, seems to be, a 
perpetual tendency to prefer the private 
law, to obey the {^vate impulse, to the 


349 

exclusion of the law of universal being. 
The hero is great by means of the pre- 
dominance of the universal nature; he 
has only to open his mouth and it speaks ; 
he has only to be forced to act, and it 
acts. All men catch the word, or embrace 
the deed, with the heart, for it is verily 
theirs as much as his ; but in them this 
disease of an excess of organisation cheats 
them of equal issues. Nothing is more 
simple than greatness ; indeed, to be sim- 
ple is to be great. The vision of genius 
comes by renouncing the too officious 
activity of the understanding, and giving 
leave and amplest privilege to the spon- 
taneous sentiment. Out of this must all 
that is alive and genial in thought go. Men 
grind and grind in the mill of a truism, 
and nothing comes out but what was put 
in. But the moment they desert the tra- 
dition for a spontaneous thought, then 
poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anec- 
dote, all flock to their aid. Observe the 
phenomenon of extempore debate. A 
man of cultivated mind, but reserved 
habits, sitting silent, admires the miracle 
of free, impassioned, picturesque speech, 
in the man addressing an assembly — a 
state of being and power, how unlike his 
own ! Presently his own emotion rises to 
his lips, and overflows in speech. He 
must also rise and say somewhat. Once 
embarked, once having overcome tho 
novelty of the situation, he finds it just as 
easy and natural to speak— to speak with 
thoughts, with pictures, with rhythmical 
balance of sentences — as it was to sit 
silent; for, it needs not to do, but to 
suffer; he only adjusts himself to the free 
spirit which gladly utters itself through 
him ; and motion is as easy as rest. 

2. I pass now to consider the task 
offered to the intellect of this country. 
The view 1 have taken of the resources of 
the scholar, presupposes a subject as 
broad, We do not seem to have imagined 
its riches. We have not heeded the invi- 
tation it holds out. To be as good a 
scholar as Englishmen are ; to have as 
much learning as our contemporaries; 
to have written a book that is read ; satis- 
fies us. We assume that all thought is 
already long ago adequately set down in 
books — all imaginations in poems; and 
what we say, we only throw in as confirma- 
tory of this supposed complete body of 
literature. A very shallow assumption. 
Say rather, all literature is yet to bo 
written. Poetry has scarce chanted its 
first song. The perpetual admonition o( 



MlSCELLAmnS. 


sse 

inature to us, Is, ** The world is new, un- 
tried. Do not believe the past. I give 
you the universe a virgin to-day." 

By Latin and English poetry, we were 
born and bred in an oratorio of praises of 
nature — flowers, birds, mountains, sun 
and moon ; yet the naturalist of this hour 
finds that he knows nothing, by all their 
poems, of any of these fine things ; that 
he has conversed with the mere surface 
and show of them all ; and of their es- 
sence or of their history, knows nothing. 
Further inquiry will discover that nobody 
— that not these chanting poets them- 
selves, knew anything sincere of these 
handsome natures they so commended; 
that they contented themselves with the 
passing chirp of a bird, that they saw one 
or two mornings, and listlessly looked at 
sunsets, and repeated idly these few 
glimpses in their song. But go into the 
forest, you shall find all new and undes- 
cribed. The screaming of the wild geese 
flying by night ; the thin note of the com- 
panionable titmouse, in the winter day ; 
the fall of swarms of flies, in autumn, 
from combats high in the air, pattering 
down on the leaves like rain ; the angry 
hiss of the wood-birds ; the pine throwing 
out its pollen for the benefit of the next 
century ; the turpentine exuding from the 
tree ; and, indeed, any vegetation ; any 
animation; any and all, are alike un- 
attempted. The man who stands on the 
sea-shore, or who rambles in the woods, 
seems to be the first man that ever stood 
on the shore, or entered a grove, his 
sensations and his world are so novel and 
strange. Whilst I read the poets, I think 
that nothing new can be said about morn- 
ing and evening. But when I see the day- 
break, I am not reminded of these 
Homeric, or Shakesperian, or Miltonic, or 
Chaucerian pictures. No ; but I feel per- 
haps the pain of an alien world : a world 
not yet subdued by the thought ; or, I am 
cheered by the moist, warm, glittering, 
budding, melodious hour that takes down 
the narrow walls of my soul, and extends 
its life and pulsation to the very horizon. 
Thai is morning, to cease for a bright 
hour to be a prisoner of this sickly body, 
and to become as large as nature. 

The noonday darkness of the American 
forest, the deep echoing, aborginal 
woods, where the living columns of the 
oak and fir tower up from the ruins 
of the trees of the last millennium ; 
where, from year to year, the eagle and 
the crow see no intruder; the pines, 
bearded with savage moss, yet touched 


with grace by the violets at theft feet ; the 
broad, cold lowland, which forms its coast 
of vapour with the stillness of subterranean 
crystallization ; and where the traveller, 
amid the repulsive plants that are native 
in the swamp, thinks with pleasing terror 
of the distant town ; this beauty — haggard 
and desert beauty, which the sun and the 
moon, the snow and the rain, repaint and 
vary, has never been recorded by art, yet 
is not indifferent to any passenger. All 
men are poets at heart. They serve 
nature for bread, but her loveliness over- 
comes them sometimes. What mean 
these journeys to Niagara ; tliese pilgrims 
to the White Hills ? Men believe in the 
adaptations of utility, always : in the 
mountains, they may believe in the adap- 
tations of the eye. Undoubtedly, the 
changes of geology have a relation to the 
prosperous sprouting of the corn and peas 
in my kitchen garden ; but not less is 
there a relation of beauty between my 
soul and the dim crags of Agiocochook up 
there in the clouds. Every man, when 
this is told, hearkens with joy, and yet his 
own conversation with nature is still 
unsung. 

Is it otherwise with civil history ? Is it 
not the lesson of our experience that every 
man, were life long enough, would write 
history for himself? What else do these 
volumes of extracts and manuscript com- 
mentaries, that every scholar writes, 
indicate ? Greek history is one thing to 
me ; another to you. Since the birth of 
I Niebuhr and Wolf, Roman and Greek 
History have been written anew. Since 
I Carlyle wrote French History, we see that 
no history, that we have, is safe, but anew 
classifier shall give it new and more philo- 
sophical arrangement. Thucydides, Livy, 
have only provided materials. The 
moment a man of genius pronounces the 
name of the Pelasgi, of Athens, of the 
Etrurian, of the Roman people, we see 
[ their state under a new aspect. As in 
poetry and history, so in the other depart- 
ments, There are few masters or none. 
Religion is yet to be settled on its fast 
foundations in the breast of man ; and 
politics, and philosophy, and letters, and 
art. As :^et we have nothing but tendency 
and indication. 

This starting, this warping of the best 
literaiy works from the adamant of nature, 
is especially observable in philosophy. 
Let it take what tone of pretension it will, 
to this complexion must it come at last. 
Take, for example, the French Eclecti- 
cism, which Cousin esteems so conclusive : 



LITERARY ETHICS, 


there is an optical illusion in it. It avows 
great pretensions. It looks as if they had 
all truth, in taking all the systems, and 
had nothing to do, but to sift and wash 
and strain, and the gold and diamonds 
would remain in the last colander. But, 
Truth is such a flyaway, such a slyboots, 
»o untransportable and unbarrelable a 
commodity, that it is as bad to catch as 
light. Shut the shutters never so quick, 
to keep all the light in, it is all in vain ; it 
is gone before you can cry. Hold. And so 
it happens with our philosophy. Trans- 
late, collate, distil all the systems, it 
steads you nothing ; for truth will not be | 
compelled, in any mechanical manner. | 
But the first observation you make, in the 
sincere act of your nature, though on the 
veriest trifle, may open a new view of 
n»>-ture and of man, that, like a menstruum, 
shall dissolve all theories in it ; Shall take 
up Greece, Rome, Stoicism, Eclecticism, 
and what not, as mere data and food for 
analysis, and dispose of your world-con- 
taining system, as a very little unit. A 
profound thought, anywhere, classifies all 
things ; a profound thought will lift Olym- 
pus. The book of philosophy is only a 
fact, and no more inspiring fact than 
another, and no less ; but a wise man will 
never esteem it anything final and trans- 
cending. Go and talk with a man of 
genius, and the first word he utters sets all 
your so-called knowledge afloat and at 
large. Then Plato, Bacon, Kant, and the 
Eclectic Cousin, condescended instantly 
to be men and mere facts. 

I by no means aim, in these remarks, to 
disparage the merit of these or of any 
existing compositions ; I only say that 
any particular portraiture does not in any 
manner exclude or forestall a new attempt, 
but, when considered by the soul, warps 
and shrinks away. The inundation of the 
spirit sweeps away before it all our little 
architecture of wit and memory, as straws 
and straw-huts before the torrent. Works 
of the intellect are great only by com- 
parison with each other: Ivanhoe and 
Waverley compared with Castle Kadcliffe 
and the Porter novels ; but nothing is 
great — not mighty Homer and Milton — 
beside the infinite Reason. It carries 
them away as a flood. They are as a 
sleep. 

Thus is justice done to each generation 
and individual — wisdom teaching man 
that he shall not hate, or fear, or mimic 
his ancestors; that he shall not bewail 
himself, as if the world was old, and 
thought was spent, and Xia was bom into 


33 * 

the dotage of things : fbr, by virtue of tha 
Deity, thought renews itself inexhaustibly 
every day, and the thing whereon it shines, 
though it were dust and sand, is a new 
subject with countless relations, 

III. Having thus spoken of the resources 
and the subject of the scholar, out of the 
same faith proceeds also the rule of his 
ambition and life. Let him know that the 
world is his, but he must possess it by 
putting himself into harmony with the 
constitution of things. He must be a 
solitary, laborious, modest, and charitable 
soul. 

He must embrace solitude as a bride, 
He must have his glees and his glooms 
alone. His own estimate must be meas- 
ure enough, his own praise reward enough 
for him. And why must the student be 
solitary and silent ? That he may become 
acquainted with his thoughts. If he pines 
in a lonely place, hankering for the crowd, 
for display, he is not in the lonely place ; 
his heart is in the market; he does not 
see ; he does not hear ; he does not think. 
But go cherish your soul ; expel com- 
panions; set your habits to a life of 
solitude ; then, will the faculties rise fair 
and full within, like forest trees and field 
flowers ; you will have results, which, 
when you meet your fellow-men, you can 
communicate, and they will gladly receive. 
Do not go into solitude only that you may 
presently come into public. Such solitude 
denies itself, is public and stale. The 
public can get public experience, but 
they wish the scholar to replace to them 
those private, sincere, divine experiences, 
of which they have been defrauded by 
’dwelling in the street. It is the noble, 
manlike., just thought, which is the superi- 
ority demanded of you, and not crowds but 
solitude confers this elevation. Not 
insulation of place, but independence of 
spirit is essential, and it is only as the 
garden, the cottage, the forest, and the 
rock are a sort of mechanical aids to this, 
that they are of value. Think alone, and 
all places are friendly ’and sacred. The 
poets who have lived in cities have been 
hermits still. Inspiration makes solitude 
anywhere. Pindar, Raphael, Angelo, 
Dryden, De Statil, dwell in crowds, it may 
be, but the instant thought comes, the 
crowd grows dim to their eye ; their eye 
fixes on the horizon — on vacant space; 
they forget the bystanders ; they spurn 
personal relations ; they deal with abstrac- 
tions, with verities, with ideas. They art 
alone with the mind. 



MISCELLANIES. 


85 ^» 

Of coufSdi 1 wduld ttot have any super- 
•tition about solitude. Let the youth 
study the uses of solitude and of society. 
Let him use both, not serve either. The 
reason why an ingenious soul shuns 
society is to the end of finding society. 
It repudiates the false, out of love of the 
true. You can very soon learn all that 
society can teach you for one while. Its 
foolish routine, an indefinite multiplica- 
tion of balls, concerts, rides, theatres, can 
teach you no more than a few can. Then 
accept the hint of shame, of spiritual 
emptiness and waste, which true nature 
gives you, and retire, and hide ; lock the 
door; shut the shutters; then welcome 
falls the imprisoning rain — dear hermitage 
of nature. Re-collect the spirits. Have 
solitary prayer and praise. Digest and 
correct the past experience ; and blend it 
with the new and divine life. 

You will pardon me. Gentlemen, if I 
say, I think that we have need of a more 
rigorous scholastic rule ; such an asceti- 
cism, I mean, as only the hardihood and 
devotion of the scholar himself can en- 
force. We live in the sun and on the 
surface — a thin, plausible, superficial ‘ 
existence, and talk of muse and prophet, | 
of art and creation. But out of our shal- 
low and frivolous way of life, how can 
greatness ever grow ? Come now, let us 
go and be dumb. Let us sit with our 
hands on our mouths, a long, austere, 
Pythagorean lustrum. Let us live in cor- 
ners, and do chores, and suffer, and weep, 
and drudge, with eyes and hearts that 
love the Lord. Silence, seclusion, aus- 
terity, may pierce deep into the grandeur 
and secret of our being, and so diving, 
bring up out of secular darkness the sub- 
limities of the moral constitution. How 
mean to go blazing, a gaudy butterfly, in 
fashionable or political saloons, the fool of 
society, the fool of notoriety, a topic for 
newspapers, a piece of the street, and 
forfeiting the real prerogative of the 
russet coat, the privacy, and the true and 
warm heart of the citizen 1 

Fatal to the man of letters, fatal to man. 
is the lust of display, the seeming that 
unmakes our being. A mistake of the 
main end to which they labour is incident 
to literary men, who, dealing with the 
organ of language — the subtlest, strongest, 
and longest-lived of man’s creations, and 
only fitly used as the weapon of thought 
and of justice — learn to enjoy the pride 
of playing with this splendid engine, but 
rob it of its almightiness by failing to 
work with it. Extricating themselves 


from the tasks Of the world, tho world 
revenges itself by exposing, at every turn, 
the folly of these incomplete, pedantic, 
useless, ghostly creatures. The scholar 
will feel that the richest romance — the 
noblest fiction that was ever woven — the 
heart and soul of beauty — lies enclosed 
in human life. Itself of surpassing value, 
it is also the richest material for his 
creations. How shall he know its secrets 
of tenderness, of terror, of will, and ot 
fate ? How can he catch and keep the 
strain of upper music that peals from it ? 
Its laws are concealed under the details 
of daily action. All action is an experi- 
ment upon them. He must bear his 
share of the common load. He must 
work with men in houses, and not with 
their names in books. His needs, appe- 
tites, talents, affections, accomplishments,, 
are keys that open to him the beautiful mur 
seum of human life. Why should he read 
it as an Arabian tale, and not know, in his 
own beating bosom, its sweet and smart ? 
Out of love and hatred, out of earnings 
and borrowings, and lendings and losses; 
out of sickness and pain ; out of wooing 
and worshipping: out of travelling, and 
voting, and watching, and caring ; out ot 
disgrace and contempt, comes our tuitioik 
in the serene and beautiful lawsi Let 
him not slur his lesson ; let him learn it by 
heart. Let him endeavour, exactly, bravely, 
and cheerfully to solve the problem of that 
life which is set before him. Aud this, 
by punctual action, aud not by promises 
or dreams. Believing, as in God, in the 
presence and favour of the grandest in- 
fluences, let him deserve that favour, and 
learn how to receive and use it, by fidelity, 
also to the lower observances. 

This lesson is taught, with emphasis 
in the life of the great actor of this age, 
and affords the explanation of his success. 
Bonaparte represents truly a great recent 
revolution, which we in this country, 
please God, shall carry to its farthest 
consummation. Not the least instructive 
passage in modern history seems to me 
a trait of Napolean, exhibited to the 
English when he became their prisoner. 
On coming on board the Bellerophon, a 
file of Engl'sh soldiers drawn up on deck, 
gave him a military salute. Napoleon 
observed that their manner of handling 
their arms differed from the French exer- 
cise, and, putting aside the guns of those 
nearest him, walked up to a soldier, took 
his gun, and himself went through the 
motion in the French mode. The English 
officers and men looked on with astonish* 



LITERARY ETHICS. 


meot, f’and inquired if such familiarity 
was usual with the Emperor. 

In this instance, as always, that man, 
with whatever defects or vices, represented 
performance in lieu of pretension. Feu- 
dalism and Orientalism had long enough 
thoug'it it majestic to do nothing ; the 
modern majesty consists in work. He 
belonged to a class, fast growing in the 
world, who think that what a man can do 
is his greatest ornament, and that he al- 
ways consults his dignity by doing it, He 
was not a believer in luck ; he had a 
faith, like sight, in the application of 
means to ends. Means to ends is the 
motto of all his behaviour. He believed 
that the great captains of antiquity per- 
formed their exploits only by correct com- 
binations, and by justly comparing the 
relation between means and consequences ; 
efforts and obstacles. The vulgar call 
good fortune that which really is pro- 
duced by the calculations of genius. But 
Napoleon, thus faithful to facts, had also 
this crowning merit ; that, whilst he be- 
lieved in number and weight, and omitted 
no part of prudence, he believed also in 
tlie freedom and quite incalculable force 
of the soul. A man of infinite caution, he 
neglected never the least •particular of 
preparation, of patient adaptation ; yet 
nevertheless he had a sublime confidence, 
as in his all, in the sallies of the courage, 
and the faith in his destiny, which, at the 
right moment, repaired all losses, and 
demolished cavalry, infantry, king, and 
kaisar, as with irresistible thunderbolts. 
As they say the bough of the tree has the 
character of the leaf, and the whole tree 
of the bough, so, it is curious to remark, 
Bonaparte’s army partook of this double 
strength of the captain ; for, whilst strictly 
supplied in all its appointments, and 
everything expected from the valour and 
discipline of every platoon, in flank and 
centre, yet always remained his total trust 
in the prodigious revolutions of fortune, 
which his reserved Imperial Guard were 
capable of working, if, in all else, the day 
was lost. Here he was sublime. He no 
longer calculated the chance of the cannon- 
ball. He was faithful to tactics to the 
uttermost— and when all tactics had come 
to an end, then he dilated, and availed 
himself of the mighty saltations of the 
most formidable soldiers in nature. 

Let the scholars appreciate this combi- 
nation of gifts, which, applied to better 
purpose, make true wisdom. He is a re- 
vealer of things. Let him first learn the 
things. Let him not. too eager to grasp 


353 

some badge of reward, omit the work to 
be done. Let him know that, though the 
success of the market is in the reward, 
true success is the doing ; that, in the pri- 
vate obedience to his mind ; in the sedu- 
lous inquiry, day after day, year after 
year, to know how the thing stands ; in the 
use of all means, and most in the reverence 
of the humble commerce and humble 
needs of life— to hearken what they say, 
and so, by mutual reaction of thought and 
life, to make thought solid, and life wise ; 
and in a contempt for the gabble of to- 
day’s opinions, the secret of the world is 
to be learned, and the skill truly to unfold 
it is acquired. Or, rather, is it not, that 
by this discipline, the usurpation of the 
senses is overcome, and the lower facul- 
ties of man are subdued to docility; 
through which, as an unobstructed channel, 
the soul now easily and gladly flows ? 

The good scholar will not refuse to 
bear the yoke in his youth ; to know, if he 
can, the uttermost secret of toil and en- 
durance ; to make his own hands ac- 
quainted with the soil by which he is fed, 
and the sweat that goes before comfort 
I and luxury. Let him pay his tithe, and 
, serve the world as a true and noble man ; 
never forgetting to worship the immortal 
divinities, who whisper to the poet, and 
make him the utterer of melodies that 
pierce the ear of eternal time. If he have 
this twofold goodness — the drill and the 
inspiration — then he has health ; then he 
is a whole, and not a fragment ; and the 
perfection of his endowment will appear 
in his compositions. Indeed, this twofold 
merit characterizes ever the productions 
of great masters. The man of genius 
should occupy the whole space between 
God or pure mind, and the multitude of 
uneducated men. He must draw from the 
infinite Reason, on one side ; and he must 
penetrate into the heart and sense of the 
crowd, on the other. From one, he must 
draw his strength ; to the other, he must 
owe his aim. The one yokes him to the 
real ; the other, to the apparent. At one 
pole, is Reason ; at the other. Common 
Sense. If he be defective at either ex- 
treme of the scale, his philosophy will 
seem low and utilitarian ; or it will appear 
too vague and indefinite for the uses of 
life. 

The student, as we all along insist, is 
great only by being passive to the super- 
incumbent spirit. Let this faith, then, 
dictate all his action, Snares and bribes 
abound to mislead him ; let him bo true 
Bovertheless. His success has its perils 



MISCELLANIES. 


354 

too. There is somewhat inconvenient and 
Injurious in his position. They whom his 
thoughts have entertained or inflamed, 
seek him before yet they have learned the 
hard conditions of thought. They seek 
him, that he may turn his lamp on the 
dark riddles whose solution they think is 
inscribed on the walls of their being. They 
find that he is a poor, ignorant man, in a 
white-seamed, rusty coat, like themselves, 
nowise emitting a continuous stream of 
light, but now and then a jet of luminous 
thought, followed by total darkness ; 
moreover, that he cannot make of his in- 
frequent illumination a portable taper to 
carry whither he would, and explain now 
this dark riddle, now that. Sorrow 
ensues. The scholar regrets to damp the 
hope of ingenuous boys ; and the youth has 
lost a star out of his new flaming firma- 
ment. Hence the temptation to the 
scholar to mystify ; to hear the question ; 
to sit upon it ; to make an answer of 
words, in lack of the oracle of things. 
Not the less let him be cold and true, and 
wait in patience, knowing that truth can 
make even silence eloquent and memora- 
ble, Truth shall be policy enough for 
him. Let him open his breast to all 
honest inquiry, and be an artist superior 
to tricks of art. Show frankly as a saint 
would do, your experience, methods, tools, 
and means. Welcome all comers to the 
freest use of the same. And out of this 
superior frankness and charity, you shall 
learn higher secrets of your nature, which 
gods will bend and aid you to communi- 
cate. 

If, with a high trust, he can thus submit 
himself, he will find that ample returns 
are poured into his bosom, out of what 
•eemed hours of obstruction and loss, 
Let him not grieve too much on account 
of unfit associates. When he sees how 
much thought he owes to the disagreeable 
antagonism of various persons who pas« 
and cross him, he can easily think that in 
a society of perfect sympathy, no word, 
no act, no record, would be. He will 
learn, that it is not much matter what he 
reads, what he does, Be a scholar, and 
he shall have the scholar’s part of every- 
thing. As, in the counting-room, the mer- 
chant cares little whether the cargo be 
hides or barilla ; the transaction, a letter 
of credit or a transfer of stocks ; be it 
what it may, his commission comes gently 
out of it ; so you shall get your lesson out 
of the hour, and the object, whether it be 
a concentrated or wasteful employment, 
even in reading a dull book, or working I 


off a stint of mechanical day labour, which 
your necessities or the necessities of others 
impose. 

Gentlemen, I have ventured to offer you 
these considerations upon the scholar’s 
place, and hope, because I thought, that, 
standing, as many of you now do, on the 
threshold of this College, girt and ready 
to go and assume tasks, public and private, 
in your country, you would not be sorry to 
be admonished of those primary duties of 
the intellect, whereof you will seldom hear 
from the lips of your new companions. 
You will hear every day the maxims of a 
low prudence. You will hear, that the 
first duty is get land and money, place and 
name. ‘ What is this Truth you seek ? 
what is this Beauty ? ’ men will ask, with 
derision. If, nevertheless, God have called 
any of you to explore truth and beauty, be 
bold, be firm, be true. When you shall 
say, ‘ As others do, so will I : I renounce, 
I am sorry for it, my early visions ; I must 
eat the good of the land, and let learning 
and romantic expectations go, until a 
more convenient season;’ then dies. the 
man in you ; then once more perish the 
buds of art, and poetry, and science, as 
they have died already in a thousand thou- 
sand men. The hour of that choice is the 
crisis of your history ; and see that you 
hold yourself fast by the intellect. It is 
this domineering temper of the sensual 
world, that creates the extreme need ol 
the priests of science ; and it is the office 
and right of tlie intellect to make and not 
take its estimate. Bend to the persuasion 
which is flowing to you from every object 
in nature, to be its tongue to the heart of 
man, and to show the besotted world hovr 
passing fair is wisdom. Forewarned that 
the vice of the times and the country is an 
excessive pretension, let us seek the shade, 
and find wisdom in neglect. Be content 
with a little light, so it be your own. Ex- 
plore, and explore. Be neither chided 
nor flattered out of your position of per- 
petual inquiry. Neither dogmatize, nor 
accept another’s dogmatism. Why should 
you renounce your right to traverse the 
star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature 
comforts an acre, house, and barn? 
Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. 
Make yourself necessary to the world, and 
mankind will give you bread, and if not 
store of it, yet such as shall not take away 
your property in all men’s possessions, in 
all men’s affections, in art, in nature, and 
in hope. 

You wUl not fear, that 1 am enjoining too 



THE METHOD OF NATURE. 355 


stern an asceticism. Ask not, Of what 
use is a scholarship that systematically 
retreats ? or, Who is the better for the 
philosopher who conceals his accomplish- 
ments, and hides his thoughts from the 
waiting world ? Hides his thoughts I Hide 
the sun and moon. Thought is all light, and 
publishes itself to the universe. It will 
speak, though you were dumb, by its own 


miraculous organ, ft will flow out of yoiyr 
actions, your manners, and your face It 
will bring you friendships. It will im- 
pledge you to truth by the love and expec- 
tation of general minds. 

By virtue of the laws of that Nature, 
which is one and perfect, it shall yield 
every sincere good that is in the soul, to 
the scholar beloved of earth and heaven. 


THE METHOD OF NATURE. 


An Oration Delivered before the Society of the Adelphi, in 
Waterville College, Maine, August ii, 1841. 


Gentlemen : — 

Let us exchange congratulations on the 
enjoyments and the promises of this liter- 
ary anniversary. The land we live in has 
no interest so dear, if it knew its want, as 
the fit consecration of days of reason and 
thought. Where there is no vision, the 
people perish. The scholars are the 
priests of that thought which establishes 
the foundations of the earth. No matter 
what is their special work or profession, 
ihey stand for the spiritual interest of the 
world, and it is a common calamity if they 
neglect their post in a country where the 
material interest is so predominant as it 
is in America. We hear something too 
much of the results of machinery, com- 
merce, and the useful arts. We are a 
puny and a fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, 
and following are our diseases. The 
rapid wealth which hundreds in the com- 
munity acquire in trade, or by the 
incessant expansions of our population 
and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest ; 
the luck of one is the hope of thousands, 
and the bribe acts like the neighbourhood 
of a gold-mine to impoverish the farm, 
the school, the church, the house, and the 
very body and feature of man. 

I do not wish to look with sour aspect 
at the industrious manufacturing village, 
or the mart of commerce. I love the 
music of the water-mill ; I value the rail- 
way ; I feel the pride which the sight of a 
ship inspires ; I look on trade and every 
mechanical craft as education also. But 
let me discriminate what is precious here- 
in. There is in each of these works an 
act of invention, an intellectual step, or 
short series of steps taken; that act or 
step is the spiritual act: all the rest is 
mere repetition of the same a thousand 
times. And 1 will net be dieeived intp 


admiring the routine of handicrafts and 
mechanics, how splendid soever the result, 
any more than I admire the routine of 
the scholars or clerical class. That splen- 
did results ensue from the labours of 
: stupid men, is the fruit of higher laws 
than their will, and the routine is not to 
be praised for it. I would not have the 
labourer sacrificed to the result — I would 
not have the labourer sacrificed to my 
convenience and pride, nor to that of a 
great class of such as me, Let there be 
worse cotton and better men. The weaver 
should not be bereaved of his superiority 
to his work, and his knowledge that the 
product or the skill is of no value, except 
so far as it embodies his spiritual preroga- 
tives. If I see nothing to admire in the 
unit, shall I admire a million units ? Men 
stand in awe of the city, but do not honour 
any individual citizen ; and are contin- 
ually yielding to this dazzling result of 
numbers, that which they would never 
yield to the solitary example of any one. 

Whilst the multitude of men degrade 
each other, and give currency to despond- 
ing doctrines, the scholar must be a 
bringer of hope, and must reinforce man 
against himself. I sometimes believe that 
our literary anniversaries will presently 
assume a greater importance, as the eyes 
of men open to their capabilities. Here, 
a new set of distinctions, a new order of 
ideas, prevail. Here, we set a bound to 
the respectability of wealth, and a bound 
to the pretensions of the law and tha 
church. The bigot must cease to be a 
bigot to-day. Into our charmed circle, 
power cannot enter; and the sturdiest 
defender of existing institutions feels tha 
terrific inflammability of this air which 
condenses heat into every corner that 
restore to tha elements the fabrics ol 



MISCELLANIES, 


356 


ages« Nothing solid is soenre : everything 
tilts and rocks. Even the scholar is not 
safe ; he too is searched and revised. Is 
his learning dead ? Is he living in his 
memory ? The power of mind is not 
mortification, but life. But come forth, 
thou curious child I hither, thou loving, 
all-hoping poet I hither, thou tender, 
doubting heart, who has not yet found any 
place in the world's market fit for thee ; 
any wares which tliou couldst buy or sell 
 — so large is thy love and ambition — thine 
and not theirs is the hour. Smooth thy 
brow, and hope and love on, for the kind 
heaven justifies thee, and the whole world 
feels that thou art in the right. 

We ought to celebrate this hour by ex- 
pressions of manly joy. Not thanks, not 
prayer seem quite hlghoc* or truest 
name for our communication with the ii*' 
finite — but glad and conspiring reception 
— reception that becomes giving in its 
turn, as the receiver is only the All-Giver 
in part and in infancy. I cannot — nor 
can any man— speak precisely of things so 
sublime, but it seems to me, the wit of 
man, his strength, his grace, his tendency, 
his art, is the grace and the presence of 
God. It is beyond explanation. When 
all is said and done, the rapt saint is found j 
the only logician. Not exhortation, not ! 
argument becomes our lips, but paeans of 
joy and praise. But not of adulation ; we 
are too nearly related in the deep of the 
mind to that we honour. It is God in us 
v/hich checks the language of petition by 
a grander thought. In the bottom of the 
heart, it is said ; “ I am, and by me, O 
child ! this fair body and world of thine 
stands and grows. I am ; all things are 
mine : and all mine are thine.” 

The festival of the intellect, and the 
return to its source, cast a strong light on 
the always interesting topics of Man and 
Nature. We are forcibly reminded of the 
old want. There is no man ; there hath 
never been. The Intellect still asks that 
a man may be born. The flame of life 
flickers feebly in human breasts. We de- 
mand of men a richness and universality 
we do not find. Great men do not content 
us. It is their solitude, not their force, 
that makes them conspicuous, There is 
somewhat indigent and tedious about 
them. They are poorly tied to one 
thought. If they are prophets, they are 
egotists: if polite and various, they are 
shallow. How tardily men arrive at any 
result; how tardily they pass from it to 
another I The crystal sphere of thought 
If M Ggnceotrigal 119 tb^ 


ture of the globe. As our soils and rocka 
lie in strata, concentric strata, so do all 
men’s thinkings run laterally, never verti^- 
cally. Here comes by a great inquisitor 
with augur and plumb-line, and will bore 
an Artesian well through our conventions 
and theories, and pierce to the core of 
things. But as soon as he probes the 
crust, behold gimlet, plumb-line, and 
philosopher take a lateral direction, in 
spite of all resistance, as if some strong 
wind took everything off its feet, and if 
you come month after month to see what 
progress our reformer has made— not an 
inch has he pierced — you still find him 
with new words in the old place, flitting 
about in new parts of the same old vein or 
crust. The new book says, ” I will give 
you the key to nature,” and we expect to 
go like a thunderbolt to the centre. But 
the ^thunder is a surface phenomenon^ 
makes a skin-deep cut, and so does the 
sage. The wedge turns out to be a rocket. 
Thus a man lasts but a very little while, 
for his monomania becomes insupport- 
ably tedious in a few months. It is so 
with every book and person ; and yet — 
and yet — we do not take up a new book, 
or meet a new man, without a pulse-beat 
of expectation. And this invincible hope 
of a more adequate interpreter is the sure 
prediction of his advent. 

In the absence of man, we turn to 
nature, which stands next. In the divine 
order, intellect is primary; nature, 
secondary; it is the memory of the mind. 
That which once existed in intellect as 
pure law has now taken body as Nature. 
It existed already in the mind in solution : 
now, it has been precipitated, and the 
bright sediment is the world. We can 
never be quite strangers or inferiors in 
nature. It is flesh of our flesh, and bone 
of our bone. But we no longer hold it by 
the hand ; we have lost our miraculous 
power ; our arm is no more as strong as 
the frost; nor our will equivalent to 
gravity and the elective attractions. Yet 
we can use nature as a convenient standard 
and the meter of our rise and fall. It has 
this advantage as a witness, it cannot bo 
debauched. When man curses, nature 
still tesli/.es to truth and love. We may, 
therefore, safely study the mind in nature, 
because we cannot steadily gaze on it in 
mind ; as we explore the face of the sun 
in a pool, when our eyes cannot brook his 
direct splendours. 

It seems to me, therefore, that it were 
some suitable paean, if we should piously 
this hgur by explgriog the 



JHB METHOD OF NATURE. 


method of nature. Let us see that^ Ml 
nearly as we can, and try how far it is | 
transferable to the literary life. Every 
earnest glance we give to the realities 
around us, with intent to learn, proceeds 
from a holy impulse, and is really songs 
of praise. What difference can it make 
whether it take the shape of exhortation, 
or of passionate exclamation, or of scien- 
tific statement ? These are forms merely. 
Through them, we express, at last, the 
fact that God has done thus or thus. 

In treating a subject so large, in which 
we must necessarily appeal to the intuition, 
and aim much more to suggest, than to 
describe, I know it is not easy to speak 
with the precision attainable on topics of 
less scope. I do not wish in attempting 
to paint a man, to describe an air-fed, 
unimpassioned, impossible ghost. My 
eyes and ears are revolted by any neglect 
of the physical facts, the limitations of 
man. And yet one who conceives the true 
order of nature, and beholds the visible 
as proceeding from the invisible, cannot 
state his thought, without seeming to those 
who study the physical laws, to do them 
some injustice. There is an intrinsic 
defect in the organ. Language overstates. 
Statements of the infinite are usually felt 
to be unjust to the finite, and blasphemous. 
Empedocles undoubtedly spoke a truth of 
thought, when he said, “ I am God ” ; but 
tlio moment it was out of his mouth, it 
became a lie to the ear : and the world 
revenged itself for the seeming arrogance, 
by the good story about his shoe. How 
can I hope for better hap in my attempts 
to enunciate spiritual facts ? Yet let us 
hope, that as far as we receive the truth, 
BO far shall we bo felt by every true person 
to say what is just. 

The method of nature : who could ever 
analyse it ? That rushing steam will not 
stop to be observed. We can never sur- 
prise nature in a corner, never find the 
end of a thread ; never tell where to set 
the first stone. The bird hastens to lay 
her egg, the egg hastens to be a bird. 
The wholeness we admire in the order of 
the world, is the result of infinite distri- 
bution. Its smoothness is the smoothness 
of the pitch of the cataract. Its perma- 
nence is a perpetual inchoation. Every 
natural fact is an emanation, and that 
from which it emanates is an emanation 
also, and from every emanation is a new 
emanation. If anything could stand still, 
it w'ould be crushed and dissipated by the 
torrent it resisted, and if it were a mind, 
would be grazed ; as iiisane perspna are 


357 

those who hold fast to one thought, and 
do not flow with the course of nature, 
not the cause, but an ever novel effect, 
nature descends always from above, It is 
unbroken obedience. The beauty of 
these fair objects is imported into them 
from a metaphysical and eternal spring. 
In all animal and vegetable forms, the 
physiologist concedes that no chemistry, 
no mechanics, can account for the facts, 
but a mysterious principle of life must bo 
assumed, which not only inhabits the 
organ, but makes the organ. 

How silent, how spacious, what room 
for all, yet without place to insert an atom 
— in graceful succession, in equal fulness, 
in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours 
goes forward still. Like an odour of 
incense, like a strain of music, like a 
sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will 
not be dissected, nor unravelled, nor 
shown. Away profane philosopher ! 
seekest thou in nature the cause ? This 
refers to that, and that to the next, and 
the next to the third, and everything 
refers. Thou must ask in another mood, 
thou must feel it and love it, thou must 
behold it in a spirit as grand as that by 
which it exists, ere thou canst know the 
law. Known it will not be, but gladly 
beloved and enjoyed. 

The simultaneous life throughout the 
whole body, the equal serving of innu- 
merable ends without the least emphasis or 
preference to any, but the steady degrada- 
tion of each to the success of all, allowing 
the understanding no place to work. 
Nature can only be conceived as existing 
to a universal and not to a particular end, 
to a universe of ends, and not to one — 
a work of ecstasy, to be represented by a 
circular movement, as intention might be 
signified by a straight line of definite 
length. Each effect strengthens every 
other. There is no revolt in all the king- 
doms from the commonweal : no detach- 
ment of an individual. Hence the catholic 
character which makes every leaf an 
exponent of the world. When we behold 
the landscape in a poetic spirit, we do not 
reckon individuals. Nature knows neither 
palm nor oak, but only vegetable life, 
which sprouts into forests, and festoons 
the globe with a garment of grasses and 
vines. 

That no single end may be selected, and 
nature judged thereby, appears from this 
that if man himself bo considered as the 
end, and it be assumed that the final cause 
of the world is to make holy or wise of 
Iwautiful meOf we see that it has Dpt sm* 



MISCELLANIES, 


558 

ceeded. Read alternately in natural and 
in civil history, a treatise of astronomy 
for example, with a volume of French, 
M/moires pour servir. When we have 
spent our wonder in computing this 
wasteful hospitality with which boon 
nature turns off new firmaments without 
end into her wide common, as fast as the 
madrepores make coral — suns and planets 
hospitable to souls — and then shorten the 
Bight to look into this court of Louis Qua- 
torze, and see the game that is played 
there — duke and marshal, abb6 and 
madame — a gambling table, where each is 
laying traps for the other, where the end 
is ever by some lie or fetch to outwit your 
rival and ruin him with this solemn fop in 
wig and stars, the king ; one can hardly 
help asking if this planet is a fair speci- 
men o£ the so generous astronomy, and if 
so, whether the experiment have not failed 
and whether it be quite worth while to 
make more, and glut the innocent space 
with so poor an article. 

I think we feel not much otherwise if, 
instead of beholding foolish nations, we 
take the great and wise men, the eminent 
souls, and narrowly inspect their bio- 
graphy, None of them seen by himself — 
and his performance compared with his 
promise or idea, will justify the cost of that 
enormous apparatus of means by which 
this spotted and defective person was at 
last procured. 

To questions of this sort, nature replies, 

I grow.” All is nascent, infant. When 
we are dizzied with the arithmetic of the 
savant toiling to compute the length of 
her line, the return of her curve, we are 
Steadied by the perception that a great 
deal is doing ; that all seems just begun ; 
remote aims are in active accomplish- 
ment. We can point nowhere to anything 
final ; but tendency appears on all hands : 
planet, system, constellation, total nature 
is growing like a field of maize in July; is 
becoming somewhat else ; is in rapid 
metamorphosis. The embryo does not 
more strive to be man, than yonder burr 
of light we call a nebula tends to be a 
ring, a comet, a globe, and parent of new 
Btars, Why should not then these mes- 
sieurs of Versailles strut and plot for 
tabourets and ribbons, for a season, with- 
out prejudice to their faculty to run on 
better errands by and by ? 

But nature seems further to reply: “I 
have ventured so great a stake as my 
success, in no single creature. I have not 
yet arrived at any end. The gardener 
«imB to produce u fine peach or peari but 


my aim is the health of the whole tree- 
root, stem, leaf, flower, and seed — and by 
no means the pampering of a monstrous 
pericarp at the expense of all the other 
functions.” 

In short, the spirit and peculiarity of 
that impression nature makes on us, is 
this, that it does not exist to any one or 
to any number of particular ends, but to 
numberless and endless benefit ; that 
there is in it no private will, no rebel leaf 
or limb, but the whole is oppressed by one 
superincumbent tendency, obeys that 
redundancy or excess of life which in 
conscious beings we call ecstasy. 

With this conception of the genius or 
method of nature, let us go back to man. 
It is true, he pretends to give account of 
himself to himself, but at last, what has 
he to recite but the fact that there is a 
Life not to be described or known other- 
wise than by possession ? What account 
can he give of his essence more than so it 
was to be ? The royal reason, the Grace 
of God, seems the only description of our 
multiform but ever identical fact. There 
is virtue, there is genius, there ia success, 
or there is not. There is the incoming or 
the receding of God : that is all that we 
can affirm ; and we can show neither how 
nor why. Self-accusation, remorse, and 
the didactic morals of self-denial and 
[ strife with sin, are in the view we are con- 
j strained by our constitution to take of the 
fact seen from the platform of action ; but 
seen from the platform of intellection, 
there is nothing for us but praise and 
wonder. 

The termination of the world in a man 
appears to be the last victory of intelligence 
The universal does not attract us until 
housed in an individual. Who heeds the 
waste abyss of possibility ? The ocean is 
everywhere the same, but it has no char- 
acter until seen with the shore or the ship. 
Who would value any number of miles of 
Atlantic brine bounded by lines of latitude 
and longitude ? Confine it by granite 
rocks, let it wash a shore where wise men 
dwell, and it is filled with expression ; and 
the point of greatest interest is where the 
land and water meet. So must we admire 
in man, the form of the formless, the con- 
centration of the vast, the house of reason, 
the cave of memory. See the play of 
thoughts ! what nimble gigantic creatures 
are these ! what saurians, what palai- 
otheria shall bo named with these agile 
movers? The great Pan of old, who was 
clothed in a leopard-skin to signify the 
)9^utiful TSjiety gf things, and tlM firioia* 



THE METHOD OF NATURE. 


mant, his coat of stars — wa* but the 
representative of thee, O rich and various 
Man I thou palace of sight and sound, 
carrying in thy senses the morning and 
the night and the unfathomable galaxy ; 
in thy brain, the geometry of the City of 
God ; in thy heart, the bower of love and 
the realms of right and wrong. An indi- 
vidual man is a fruit which it cost all the 
foregoing ages to form and ripen. The 
history of the genesis or the old mythology 
repeals itself in the experience of every 
child. He too is a demon or god thrown | 
into a particular chaos, where he strives 
ever to lead things from disorder into i 
order. Each individual soul is such, in 
virtue of its being a power to translate the 
world into some particular language of its 
own ; if not into a picture, a statue, or a 
dance — why, then, into a trade, an art, a 
science, a mode of living, a conversation, 
a character, an influence. You admire 
pictures, but it is as impossible for you to 
paint a right picture, as for grass to bear 
apples. But when the geniu:; comes, it 
makes fingers: it is pliancy, and the 
power of transferring the affair in the 
street into oils and colours. Raphael 
must be born, and Salvator must be born. 

There is no attractiveness like that of a 
new man. The sleepy nations are occu- 
pied with their political routine. England, 
France, and America read Parliamentary 
Debates, which no high genius now 
enlivens ; and nobody will read them who 
trusts his own eye : only they who are 
deceived by the popular repetition of dis- 
tinguished names. But when Napoleon 
unrolls his map, the eye is commanded 
by original power. When Chatham leads 
the debate, men may well listen, because 
they must listen. A man, a personal 
ascendency, is the only great phenomenon. 
When nature has work to be done, she 
creates a genius to do it. Follow the 
great man, and you shall see what the 
world has at heart in these ages. There 
is no omen like that. i 

But what strikes us in the fine genius is 
that which belongs of right to everyone. 
A man should know himself for a neces- 
sary actor. A link was wanting between 
two craving parts of nature, and ho was 
hurled into being as the bridge over that * 
yawning need, the mediator betwix two 
else unmarriageable facts. His two 
parents held each of one of the wants, 
and the union of foreign constitutions in 
him enables him to do gladly and grace- 
fully what the assembled human race 
could aot hAve sufficed to do. He knows 


359 

his materials ; he appliee himself to his 
work; he cannot read, or think, or look, 
but he unites the hitherto separated 
strands into a perfect cord. The thoughts 
he delights to utter are the reason of his 
incarnation ? It is for him to account 
himself cheap and superfluous, or to linger 
by the wayside for opportunities ? Did ha 
not come into being because something 
must be done which he and no other is 
and does ? If only he sees, the world will 
be visible enough. He need not study 
where to stand, nor to put things in favour- 
able lights ; in him is the light, for him all 
things are illuminated to their centre. 
What patron shall he ask for employment 
and reward ? Hereto was he born, to 
deliver the thought of his heart from the 
universe to the universe, to do an office 
which nature could not forego, nor he bo 
discharged from rendering, and then im- 
merge again into the holy silence and 
eternity out of which as a man he arose, 
God is rich, and many more men than one 
he harbours in his bosom, biding their time 
and the needs and the beauty of all. Is 
not this the theory of every man’s genius 
or faculty ? Why then goest thou as some 
Boswell or listening worshipper to this 
saint or to that ? That is the only lese- 
majesty. Here art thou with whom so 
long the universe travailed in labour; 
darest thou think meanly of thyself whom 
the stalwart Fate brought forth to unite 
his ragged sides, to shoot the gulf, to 
reconcile the irreconcilable ? 

Whilst a necessity so great caused the 
man to exist, his health and erectness con- 
sist in the fidelity with which he transmits 
influences from the vast and universal to 
the point on which his genius can act. 
The ends are momentary : they are vents 
for the current of inward life which in- 
creases as it is spent. A man’s wisdom 
is to know that all ends are momentary, 
that the best end must be superseded by 
a better. But there is a mischevious 
tendency in him to transfer his thought 
from the life to the ends, to quit his 
agency and rest in his acts : the tools run 
away with the workman, the human with 
the divine. I conceive a man as always 
spoken to from behind, and unable to 
turn his head and see the speaker. In all 
the millions who have heard the vpice, 
none ever saw the face. As children in 
their play run behind each other, and 
seize one by the ears and make him walk 
before them, so is the spirit our un- 
seen pilot. That well - known voice 
speaks in all languages, governt all 
3 A 



300 MISCELLANIES. 


men, and none ever caught a glimpse of 
its form. If the man will exactly obey it, 
It will adopt him, so that he shall not any 
longer separate it from himself in his 
thought, he shall seem to be it, he shall 
be it. If he listen with insatiable ears, 
richer and greater wisdom is taught him, 
the sound swells to a ravishing music, he 
U borne away as with a flood, he becomes 
careless of his food and of his house, he 
is the drinker of ideas, and leads a 
heavenly life. But if his eye is set on the 
things to be done, and not on the truth 
that is still taught, and for the sake of 
which the things are to be done, then the 
voice grows faint, and at last is but a 
humming in his ears. His health and 
greatness consist in his being the channel 
through which heaven flows to earth, in 
short, in the fulness in which an ecstatical 
state takes place in him. It is pitiful to be 
an artist, when, by forbearing tc be artists, 
we might be vessels filled with ?he divine 
overflowings, enriched by the circulations 
of omniscience and omnipresence. Are 
there not moments in the history of 
heaven when the human race was not 
counted by individuals, but was only the 
Influenced, was God in distribution, God 
rushing into multiform benefit ? It is sub- 
lime to receive, sublime to love, but this 
lust of imparting as irom us, this desire 
to be loved, the wish to be recognised as 
Individuals, is finite, comes of a lower strain. 

Shall I say, then, that, as far as we can 
trace the natural history of the soul, its 
health consists in the fulness of its recep- 
tion — call it piety, call it veneration — in 
the fact, that enthusiasm is organised 
therein. What is best in any work of art, 
but that part which the work itself seems 
to require and do ; that which the man 
cannot do again, that which flows from 
the hour and the occasion, like the 
eloquence of men in a tumultuous debate ? 
It was always the theory of literature, 
that the word of a poet was authoritative 
and final, He v/as supposed to be the 
mouth of a divine wisdom. We rather 
envied his circumstance than his talent. 
We too could have gladly prophesied 
standing in that place. We so quote our 
Scriptures; and the Greeks so quoted 
Homer, Theognis, Pindar, and the rest. 
If the theory has receded out of modern 
criticism, it is because we have not had 
poets. Whenever they appear, they will 
redeem their own credit. 

This ecstatical state seems to direct a|re- 
»ard ro the whole and not to the parts ; to 
ihQ cause oot to the eoKls i t9 


tendency, and not to the act. It re. 
spects genius and not talent : hope, and 
not possession, the anticipation of all 
things by the intellect, and not the history 
itself ; art, and not works of art ; poetry, 
and not experiment; virtue and not duties, 
There is no office or function of man 
but is rightly discharged by this divine 
method, and nothing that is not noxious to 
him if detached from its universal relations. 
Is it his work in the world to study 
nature, or the laws of the world ? Let 
him beware of proposing to himself any 
end. Is it for use, nature is debased, as if 
one looking at the ocean can remember 
only the price of fish. Or is it for plea- 
sure he is mocked ; there is a certain in- 
fatuating air in woods and mountains 
which draw on the idler to want and 
misery. There is something social and 
intrusive in the nature of all things, they 
seek to penetrate and overpower, each the 
nature of every other creature, and itself 
alone in all modes and throughout space 
and spirit to prevail and possess. Every 
star in heaven is discontented and insatia- 
ble. Gravitation and chemistry cannot 
content them. Ever they woo and court 
the eye of every beholder. Every man 
who comes into the world they seek to faak 
cinate and possess, to pass into his mind, 
for they desire to republish themselves in 
a more delicate world than that they 
occupy. It is not enough that they are 
Jove, Mars, Orion, and the North Star, in 
the gravitating firmament; they would 
have such poets as Newton, Herschel, and 
Laplace, that they may re-exist and re-ap- 
pear in the finer worldjof rational souls, and 
fill that realm with their fame. So is itwith 
all immaterial obj ects. These beautiful ba- 
silisks set their brute, glorious eyes on the 
eye of every child, and, if they can, cause 
their nature to pass through his wondering 
eyes into him, and so all things are mixed. 

Therefore man must be on his guard 
against this cup of enchantments, and 
must look at nature with a supernatural 
eye. By piety alone, by conversing with 
the cause of nature, is he safe and com- 
mands it. And because all knowledge is 
assimilation to the object of knowledge, as 
the power or genius of nature is ecstatic, 
so must its science or the description of it 
be. The poet must be a rhapsodist ; his 
inspiration a sort of bright casualty ; his 
will in it only the surrender of will to the 
Universal Power, which will not be seen 
face to face, but must be received and 
sympathetically known. It is remarkable 
that W9 bare put pf deeps pf antiquity 



THE METHOD 

In the oracles ascribed to the half-fabulous 
Zoroaster, a statement of this fact, which 
every lover and seeker of truth will recog- 
nise. It is not proper,” said Zoroaster, 
” to understand the Intelligible with vehe- 
mence, but if you incline your mind, you 
will apprehend it, not too earnestly but 
bringing a pure and inquiring eye. You 
will not understand it as when understand- 
ing some particular thing, but with the 
flower of the mind. Things divine are not 
attainable by mortals who understand 
icnsual things, but only the light-armed 
arrive at the summit.” 

And because ecstasy is the law and 
cause of nature, therefore you cannot 
interpret it in too high and deep a sense. 
Nature represents the best meaning of the 
wisest man. Does the sunset landscape 
seem to you the palace of Friendship — 
those 'purple skies and lovely waters the 
amphitheatre dressed and garnished only 
for the exchange of thought and love of 
the purest souls? It is that. All other 
meanings which base men have put on it 
are conjectural and false. You “ cannot 
bathe twice in the same river,' said Hera- 
clitus, for it is renewed every moment; 
and I add, a man never sees the same 
object twice ; with his own enlargement 
the object acquires new aspects. 

Does not the same law hold for virtue ? 
It is vitiated by too much will. He who 
aims at progress, should aim at an infinite, 
not at a special benefit. The reforms whose 
fame now fills the land with Temperance, 
Anti-slavery, Non-Resistance, No Govern- 
ment, Equal Labour, fair and generous as 
each appears, are poor bitter things when 
prosecuted for themselves as an end. To 
every reform in proportion to its energy, 
early disgusts are incidents, so that the 
disciple is surprised at the very hour of 
his first triumphs, with chagrins and sick- 
ness, and a general distrust; so that he 
shuns his associates, hates tlie enterprise 
which lately seemed so fair, and meditates 
to cast himself into the arms of that 
society and manner of life which he had 
newly abandoned with so much pride and 
hope. Is it that ho attached the value of 
virtue to some particular practices, as the 
denial of certain appetites in certain speci- 
fied indulgencies, and, afterward, found 
himself still as wicked and as far from 
happiness in that abstinence as he had 
been in the abuse ? But the soul can be 
appeased not by a deed but by a tendency. 
It is in a hope that she feels her wings. 
You shall love rectitude and not the disuse 
of money or the AToidance of trade ; an 


OF MATURE. 36 ^ 

unimpeded mind, and not a monkish diet« 
sympathy and usefulness, and not hoeing 
or coopering. Tell me not how great your 
project is, the civil liberation of the world 
its conversion into a Christian church, the 
establishment of public education, cleaner 
diet, a new division of labour and of land, 
laws of love for laws of property ; I say to 
you plainly there is no end to which your 
practical faculty can aim, so sacred or so 
large, that, if pursued for itself, will not 
at last become carrion and an offence to 
the nostril. The imaginative faculty of 
the soul must be fed with objects immense 
and eternal. Your end should be one in- 
apprehensible to the senses : then will it 
be a god always approached — never 
touched ; always giving health. A man 
adorns himself with prayer and love, as 
an aim adorns an action. What is strong 
but goodness, and what is energetic but 
the presence of a brave man ? The doc- 
trine in vegetable physiology of the 
presence, or the general influence of any 
substance over and above its chemical 
influence, as of an alkali or a living plant, 
is more predicable of man, You need not 
speak to me, I need not go where you are- 
that you should exert magnetism on me. 
Be you only whole and sufficient, and I 
shall feel you in every part of my life and 
fortune, and I can as easily dodge the 
gravitation of the globe as escape your 
influence. 

But there are other examples of this 
total and supreme influence besides Na- 
ture and the conscience. “From the 
poisonous tree, the world,” say the Brah- 
mins, *' two species of fruit are produced, 
sweet as the waters of life, Love or the 
society of beautiful souls, and Poetry, 
whose taste is like the immortal juice of 
Vishnu.” What is Love, and why is it the 
chief good, but because it is an over- 
powering enthusiasm ? Never self-pos- 
sessed or prudent, it is all abandonment. 
Is it not a certain admirable wisdom, 
preferable to all other advantages, and 
whereof all others are only secondaries 
and indemnities, because this is that in 
which tlie individual is no longer his own 
foolish master, but inhales an odorous 
and celestial air, is wrapped round -with 
awe of the object, blending for the tim® 
that object with the real and only good, 
and consults every omen in nature with 
tremulous interest. When we speak truly, 
is not he only unhappy who is not in love ? 
his fancied freedom and self-rule, is it not 
so much death ? He who is in love is 
wise, and is becQming wiser, sees newlf 



MISCELLANIES. 


36a 

every time he looks at the object beloved, 
drawing from it with his eyes and his 
mind those virtues which it possesses. 
Therefore if the object be not itself a 
living and expanding soul, he presently 
exhausts it. But the love remains in his 
mind, and the wisdom is brought him; 
and it craves a new and higher object. 
And the reason why all men honour love, 
is because it looks up and not down; 
aspires and not despairs. 

And what is Genius but finer love, a I 
love impersonal, a love of the flower and 
perfection of things, and a desire to draw 
a new picture or copy of the same ? It j 
looks to the cause and life ; it proceeds 
from within outward, whilst Talent goes 
from without inward. Talent finds its 
models, methods, and ends in society, 
exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul 
only for power to work. Genius is its 
own end, and draws its means and the 
style of its architecture from within, going 
abroad only for audience and spectator, as 
we adapt our voice and phrase to the dis- 
tance and character of the ear we speak 
to. All your learning of all literatures 
would never enable you to anticipate one 
of its thoughts or expressions, and yet 
each is natural and familiar as household 
words. Here about us coils for ever the 
ancient enigma, so old and so unutterable. 
Behold I there is the sun, and the rain, 
and the rocks ; the old sun, the old stones. 
How easy were it to describe all this fitly ; 
yet no word can pass. Nature is a mute, 
and man her articulate speaking brother, 
lo I he also is a mute. Yet when Genius 
arrives, its speech is like a river ; it has 
no straining to describe, more than there 
is straining in nature to exist. When 
thought is best, there is most of it. Genius 
sheds wisdom like perfume, and advertises 
us that it flows out of a deeper source 
than the foregoing silence, that it knows 
so deeply and speaks so musically, be- 
cause it is itself a mutation of the thing it 
describes. It is sun and moon and wave 
and fire in music, as astronomy is thought 
and harmony in masses of matter. 

What is all history but the work of ideas, 
a record of the incomputable energy which 
his infinite aspirations infuse into man ? 
Has anything grand and lasting been 
done ? Who did it ? Plainly not any 
man, but all men : it was the prevalence 
and inundation of an idea. What brought 
the pilgrims here ? One man says, civil 
liberty ; another, the desire of founding a 
church; and a third, discovers that the 
■igtifo force was pUatatioa and trade i 


But if the Puritans could rise from the 
dust, they could not answer. It is to be 
seen in what they were, and not in whal 
they designed ; it was the growth and 
expansion of the human race, and resem- 
bled herein the sequent Revolution, which 
was not begun in Concord, or Lexington, 
or Virginia, but was the overflowing of the 
sense of natural right in every clear and 
active spirit of the period. Is a man 
boastful and knowing, and his own master ? 
we turn from him without hope : but let 
him be filled with awe and dread before 
the Vast and the Divine, which uses him 
glad to be used, and our eye is riveted to 
the chain of events. What a debt is ours 
to that old religion which, in the childhood 
of most of us, still dwelt like a Sabbath 
morning in the country of New England, 
teaching privation, self-denial, and 
sorrow ! A man was born not for pros- 
perity, but to suffer for the benefit of 
others, like the noble rock-maple which 
all around our villages bleeds for the 
service of man. Not praise, not men’s 
acceptance of our doing, but the spirit’s 
holy errand through us absorbed the 
thought. How dignified was this ! How 
all that is called talents and success, in 
our noisy capitals, becomes buzz and din 
before this man -worthiness I How our 
friendships and the complaisances we use, 
shame us now I Shall we not quit our 
companions, as if they were thieves and 
pot companions, and betake ourselves to 
some desert cliff of Mount Katahdin, soma 
unvisited recess in Moosehcad Lake, to 
bewail our innocency and to recover It, 
and with it the power to communicate 
again with these sharers of a more sacred 
idea ? 

And what is to replace for us the piety 
of that race ? We cannot have theirs : it 
glides away from us day by day, but wa 
also can bask in the great morning which 
rises forever out of the eastern sea, and 
be ourselves the children of the light. I 
stand here to say, Let us worship the 
mighty and transcendent Soul. It is the 
office, I doubt not, of this age to annul 
that adulterous divorce which the super-- 
stition of many ages has effected between 
the intellect and holiness. The lovers of 
goodness have been one class, the students 
of wisdom another, as if either could exist 
in any purity without the other. Truth is 
always holy, holiness always wise. I will 
that we keep terms with sin, and a sinful 
literature and society, no longer, but live 
a life of discovery and performance. Ac- 
cept the intellect, and it will accept ui. 



MAN TUB RBBORMER. 363 


Be the lowly ministers of that pure omnis- 
cience, and deny it not before men. It 
will burn up all profane literature, all 
base current opinions, all the false powers 
of the world, as in a moment of time. I 
draw from nature the lesson of any inti- 
mate divinity. Our health and reason as 
men needs our respect to this fact, against 
the heedlessness and against the contra- 
diction of society. The sanity of man 
needs the poise of this immanent force. 
His nobility needs the assurance of this 
inexhaustible reserved power. How great 
soever have been its bounties, they are a 
drop to the sea whence they flow. If you 
say, * the acceptance of the vision is also 
the act of God : ’ I shall not seek to pene- 
trate the mystery, I admit the force of 
what you say. If you ask, ‘ How can any 
rules be given for the attainment of gifts 
so sublime ? ' I shall only remark that 
the solicitations of this spirit, as long as 
there is life, are never forborne. Tender- 
ly, tenderly, they woo and court us from 
every object in nature, from every fact in 
life, from every thought in the mind. The 
one condition coupled with the gift of 
truth is its use. That man shall be learned 
who reduceth his learning to practice, Em- 
manuel Swedenborg affirmed that it was 
opened to him, “ that the spirits who knew 
truth; in this life, but did it not, at death 
shall lose their knowledge.'* “ If know- 
ledge," said Ali the Caliph, calleth unto 
practice, well ; if not, it goeth away." 
The only way into nature is to enact our 
best insight. Instantly we are higher 
poets, and can speak a deeper law. Do 
what you know, and perception is con- 
verted into character, as islands and con- 
tinents were built by invisible infusories, 
or, as these forest leaves absorb light, 
electricity, and volatile gases, and the 
gnarled oak to live a thousand years is the 


arrest and fixation of the most volatile 
and ethereal currents.^ The doctrine of 
this Supreme Presence is a cry of joy and 
exultation. Who shall dare think he has 
come late into nature, or has missed any- 
thing excellent in the past, who seeth the 
admirable stars of possibility, and the yet 
untouched continfiHt of hope glittering 
with all its mountains in the vast West f 
I praise with wonder this great reality, 
which seems to drown all things in the 
deluge of its light. What man seeing this, 
can lose it from his thoughts, or entertain 
a meaner subject? The entrance of this 
into his mind seems to be the birth of 
man. We cannot describe the natural 
history of the soul, but we know that it is 
divine. I cannot tell if these wonderful 
qualities which house to-day in this mortal 
frame, shall ever reassemble in equal 
activity in a similar frame, or whether 
they have before had a natural history like 
that of this body you see before you ; but 
this one thing I know, that these qualities 
did not now begin to exist, cannot be sick 
with my sickness, nor buried in any 
grave ; but that they circulate through the 
Universe : before the world was, they 
were. Nothing can bar them out, or shut 
them in, they penetrate the ocean and 
land, space and time, form and essence, 
and hold the key to universal nature. 1 
draw from this faith courage and hope. 
All things are known to the soul. It is 
not to be surprised by any communiciation. 
Nothing can be greater than it. Let 
those fear and those fawn who will. The 
soul is in her native realm, and it is wider 
than space, older than time, wide as hope, 
rich as love. Pusillanimity and fear she 
refuses with a beautiful scorn : they are 
not for her who putteth on her coronation 
robes, and goes out through universal 
love to universal power. 


MAN THE REFORMER. 

A Lecture Read before the Mechanics’ Apprentices' Library 
Association, Boston, January 25, 1841, 


Mr. President, and Gentlemen 
I wish to offer to your consideration 
some thoughts on the particular and 
general relations of man as a reformer. I 
shall assume that the aim of each young 
man in this association is the very highest 
that belongs to a rational mind. Let it be 
granted that our life, as we lead it, is 


common and mean; that some of those 
offices and functions, for which we were 
mainly created are grown so rare in 
society, that the memory of them is only 
kept alive in old books acd in dim tradi* 
tions ; that prophets and poets, that beau* 
tiful and perfect men, we are not now, no, 
nor hAve even seen such ; that some 



MISCELLAmES. 


3 ^ 

■ourcM of hnmaA !nstfti6tion are almost 
unnamed, and unknown among us ; that 
the community in which we live will 
hardly bear to be told that every man 
should be open to ecstasy or a divine 
illumination, and his daily walk elevated 
by intercourse with the spiritual world. 
Grant all this, as we must, yet I suppose 
none of my auditors will deny that we 
ought to seek to establish ourselves in 
such disciplines and courses as will deserve 
that guidance and clearer communication 
with the spiritual nature. And further, I 
will not dissemble my hope, that each 
person whom I address has felt his own 
call to cast aside all evil customs, timidi 
ties, and limitations, and to be in his 
place a free and helpful man, a reformer, 
a benefactor, not content to slip along 
through the world like a footman or a spy, 
escaping by his nimbleness and apologies 
as many knocks as he can, but a brave 
and upright man, who must find or cut a 
straight road to everything excellent on 
the earth, and not only go honourably 
himself, but make it easier for all who 
follow him, to go in honour and with 
benefit. 

In the history of the world the doctrine 
of Reform had never such scope as at the 
present hour. Lutherans, Hernhutters, 
Jesuits, Monks, Quakers, Knox, Wesley, 
Swedenborg, Bentbam, in their accusa- 
tions of society, all respected something — 
church or state, literature or history, 
domestic usages, the market town, the 
dinner-table, coined money. But now all 
these and all things else hear the trumpet, 
and must rush to judgment — Christianity, 
the laws, commerce, echools, the farm, 
the laboratory ; and not a kingdom, town, 
statute, rite, calling, man or woman, but 
is threatened by the new spirit. 

What if some of the objections whereby 
our institutions are assailed are extreme 
and speculative, and the reformers tend 
to idealism ; that only shows the extrava- 
gance of the abuses which have driven the 
mind into the opposite extreme. It is 
when your facts and persons grow unreal 
and fantastic by too much falsehood, that 
the scholar flies for refuge to the world of 
ideas, and aims to recruit and replenish 
nature from that source. Let ideas es- 
tablish their legitimate sway again in 
society, let life be fair and poetic, and the 
scholars will gladly be lovers, citizens, and 
philanthropists. 

It will afford no security from the new 
Ideas, that the old nations, the laws of 
centuries, the property and iostitutiens of 


, a hundred citlefi, Afd built 6h othdf fiMinda^ 
tions. The demon of reform has a secret 
door into the heart of every lawmaser, of 
every inhabitant of every city. The fact 
that a new thought and hope have dawned 
in your breast, should apprise you that in 
the same hour a new light broke in upon 
a thousand private hearts. That secret 
which you would fain keep — as soon as 
you go abroad, lo ! there is one standing 
on the^ doorstep, to tell you the same. 
There is not the most bronzed and sharp- 
ened money-catcher, who does not, to 
your consternation, almost quail and shako 
the moment he hears a question prompted 
by the new ideas. We thought he had 
some semblance of ground to stand upon, 
that such as he at least would die hard ; 
but he trembles and flees. Then the 
scholar says, 'Cities and coaches shall 
never impose on me again; for, behold 
every solitary dream of mine is rushing to 
fulfilment. That fancy I had, and hesi- 
tated to utter because you would laugh— 
lo, the broker, the attorney, the market- 
man are saying the same thing. Had I 
waited a day longer to speak, I had been 
too lata. Behold, State Street thinks, and 
Wall Street doubts, and begins to pro- 
phesy I * 

It cannot be wondered at, that this 
general inquest into abuses should arisa 
in the bosom of society, when one con- 
siders ^ the practical impediments that 
stand in the way of virtuous young men. 
The young man, on entering life, finds the 
way to lucrative employments blocked 
with abuses. The ways of trade are 
grown selfish to the borders of theft, and 
supple to the borders (if not beyond the 
borders) of fraud. The employments of 
commerce are not intrinsically unfit for a 
man, or less genial to his faculties, but 
these are now in their general course so 
vitiated by derelictions and abuses at 
which all connive, that it requires more 
vigour and resources than can be expected 
of every young man, to right himself in 
them ; he is lost in them ; he cannot move 
hand or foot in them. Has he genius and 
virtue ? the less does he find them fit for 
him to gi'vw in. and if he would thrive in 
them, ho must sacrifice all the brilliant 
dreams of boyhood and youth as dreams ; 
he must forget the prayers of his child« 
hood ; and must take on him the harness 
of routine and obsequiousness. If not so 
minded, nothing is left him but to begin 
the world anew, as he does who puts the 
spade into the ground for food. Wo are 
all implicated, of course, in this charge, 



MAN THB REFORMER. 365 


ft ift only necessary to ask a few questions 
as to the progress of the articles of com- 
merce from the fields where they grew, 
to our houses, to become aware that we 
eat and drink and wear perjury and fraud 
in a hundred commodities. How many 
articles of daily consumption are furnished 
us from the West Indies ; yet it is said, 
that, in the Spanish islands, the venality 
of the officers of the government has 
passed into usage, and that no article 
passes into our ships which has not been 
fraudently cheapened. In the Spanish 
islands, every agent or factor of the 
Americans, unless he be a consul, has 
taken oath that he is a Catholic, or has 
caused a priest to make that declaration 
for him. The abolitionist has shown us 
our dreadful debt to the Southern negro. 
In the Island of Cuba, in addition to the 
ordinary abominations of slavery, it ap- 
appears, only men are bought for the 
plantations, and one dies in ten every 
year, of these miserable bachelors, to 
yield us sugar. I leave for those who 
have the knowledge the part of sifting the 
oaths of our custom-houses ; I will not in- 
quire into the oppression of the sailors ; I 
will not pry into the usages of our retail 
trade. I content myself v/iili the fact, 
that the general system of our trade 
(apart from the blacker traits, which, I 
hope, are exceptions denounced and un- 
shared by all reputable men) is a system 
of selfishness ; is not dictated by the high 
sentiments of human nature ; is not meas- 
ured by the exact law of reciprocity ; 
much less by the sentiments of love and 
heroism, but is a system of distrust, of 
concealment, of superior keenness, not of 
giving but of taking advantage. It is not 
that which a man delights to unlock to a ! 
noble friend ; which he meditates on with 
joy and self-approval in his hour of love 
and aspiration ; but rather what he then 
puts out of sight, only showing the bril- 
liant result, and atoning for the manner , 
of acquiring, by the manner of expending 
it. I do not charge the merchant or the 
manufacturer. The sins of our trade be- 
long to no class, to no individual. One 
lucks, one distributes, one eats. Every- | 
ody partakes, everybody confesses — with 
cap and knee volunteers his confession, yet 
none feels himself accountable. He did 
not create the abuse ; he cannot alter it. 
What is he ? an obscure private person 
who must get his bread. That is the vice 
— that no one feels himself called to act 
for man, but only as a fraction of man. It 
happens therefore that all such ingenuous 


souls as feel within themselves the irre- 
pressible strivings of a noble aim, who by 
the law of their nature must act simply, 
find these ways of trade unfit for them, 
and they come forth from it. Siu h cases 
are becoming more numerous every year. 

But by coming out of trade you have 
not cleared yourself. The trail of the 
serpent reaches into all the lucrative pro- 
fessions and practices of man. Each has 
its own wrongs. Each finds a tender and 
very intelligent conscience a disqualifica- 
tion for success. Each requires of the 
practitioner a certain shutting of the eyes, 
a certain dapperness and compliance, an 
acceptance of customs, a sequestration 
from the sentiments of generosity and 
love, a compromise of private opinion and 
integrity. Nay, the evil custom reaches 
into the whole institution of property, 
until our laws which establish and protect 
it seem not to be the issue of love and 
reason, but of selfishness. Suppose a 
man is so unhappy as to be born a saint, 
with keen perceptions, butwith^the con- 
science and love of an angel, and he is to 
get his living in the world ; he finds him- 
self excluded from all lucrative works; he 
has no farm, and he cannot get one ; for, 
to earn money enough to buy one, re- 
quires a sort of concentration towards 
money, which is the selling himself for a 
number of years, and to him the present 
hour is as sacred and inviolable as any 
future hour. Of course, whilst another 
man has no land, my title to mine, your 
title to yours, is at once vitiated. Inex- 
tricable seem to be the twinings and ten- 
drils of this evil, and we all involve our- 
selves in it the deeper by forming con- 
nections, by wives and children, by bene- 
fits and debts. 

Considerations of this kind have turned 
the attention of many philanthropic and 
intelligent persons to the claims of manual 
labour, as a part of the education of every 
young man. If the accumulated wealth 
of the past generations is thus tainted — 
no matter how much of it is offered to us 
— we must begin to consider if it were not 
the nobler part to renounce it, and to put 
ourselves into primary relations with the 
soil and nature, and abstaining from what- 
ever is dishonest and unclean, to take 
each of us bravely his part, with his own 
hands in the manual labour of the world. 

But it is said, ‘ What ! will you give up 
the immense advantages reaped from tha 
division of labour, and set every man to 
make his own shoes, bureau, knife, wagon, 
sails, and needle ? This would be to pul 



MlSCRLLAtJIBS. 


SW 

men pact into barbarism by their own 
act.’ I see no instant prospect of a vir- 
tuous revolution ; yet 1 confess, I should 
not be pained at a change which threat- 
ened a loss of some of the luxuries or 
conveniences of society, if it proceeded 
from a preference of the agricultural life 
out of the belief that our primary duties 
as men could be better discharged in that 
calling. Who could regret to see a high 
conscience and a purer taste exercising a 
sensible effect on youug men in their 
choice of occupation, and thinning the 
ranks of competition in the labours of 
commerce, of law, and of state? It is 
easy to see that the inconvenience would 
last but a short time. This would be great 
action, which always opens the eyes of 
men. When many persons shall have 
done this, when the majority shall admit 
the necessity of reform in all these insti- 
tutions, their abuses will be redressed, 
and the way will be open again to the ad- 
vantages which arise from the division of 
labour, and a man may select the fittest 
employment for his peculiar talent again 
without compromise. 

But quite apart from the emphasis 
which the times give to the doctrine, that 
the manual labour of society ought to be 
shared among all the members, there are 
reasons proper to every individual, why 
he should not be deprived of it. The use 
of manual labour is one which never 
grows obsolete, and which is inapplicable 
to no person. A man should have a farm 
or a mechanical craft for his culture. We 
must have a basis for our higher accom- 
plishments, our delicate entertainments 
of poetry and philosophy, in the work of 
our hands. We must have an antagonism 
in the tough world for all the variety of 
our spiritual faculties, or they will not be 
born. Manual labour is the study of the 
external world. The advantage of riches 
remains with him who procured them, 
not with the heir. When I go into my 
garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel 
such an exhilaration and health, that I 
discover that I have been defrauding my- 
self all this time in letting others do for 
me what I should have done with my own 
hands. But not only health, but educa- 
tion is in the work. Is it possible that I 
who get indefinite quantities of sugar, 
hominy, cotton, buckets, crockery-ware, 
and letter-paper, by simply signing my 
name once in three months to a cheque in 
favour of John Smith & Co., traders, ^et 
the fair share of exercise to my faculties 
bj that act, which nature intended to me 


in making all these far-fetched ihattera 
important to my comfort? It is Smith 
himself, and his carriers, and dealers, and 
manufacturers, it is the sailor, the hide- 
drogher, the butcher, the negro, the 
hunter, and the planter, who have inter- 
cepted the sugar of the sugar, and the 
cotton of the cotton. They have got the 
education, I only the commodity. This 
were all very well if I were necessarily 
absent, being detained by work of my 
own, like theirs, work of the same facul- 
ties ; then should I be sure of my hands 
and feet, but now I feel some shame be- 
fore my wood-chopper, my ploughman, 
and my cook, for they have some sort of 
self-sufficiency, they can contrive without 
my aid to bring the day and year round, 
but I depend on them, and have not 
earned by use a right to my arms and 
feet. 

Consider further the difference between 
the first and second owner of property. 
Every species of property is preyed on by 
its own enemies, as iron by rust ; timber 
by rot; cloth by moths; provisions by 
mould, putridity, or vermin; money by 
thieves ; an orchard by insects ; a planted 
field by weeds and the inroad of cattle ; a 
stock of cattle by hunger ; a road by rain 
and frost ; a bridge by freshets. And 
whoever takes any of these things into his 
possession, takes the charge of defending 
them from this troop of enemies, or of 
keeping them in repair. A man who sup- 
plies his own want, who builds a raft or a 
boat to go a-fishing, finds it easy to calk 
it, or put in a thole-pin, or mend the 
rudder. What he gets only as fast as he 
wants for his own ends, does not embarrass 
him, or take away his sleep with looking 
after. But when he comes to give all the 
goods he has year after year collected, in 
one estate to his son, house, orchard, 
ploughed land, cattle, bridges, hardware, 
wooden-ware, carpets, cloths, provisions, 
books, money, and cannot give him the 
skill and experience which made or col- 
lected these, and the method and place 
they have in his own life, the son finds his 
hands full — not to use these things — but 
to look after them and defend them from 
their natural enemies. To him they are 
not means, but masters. Their enemies 
will not remit; rust, mould, vermin, rain, 
sun, freshet, fire, all seize their own, fill 
him with vexation, and he is converted 
from the owner into a watchman or a 
watch-dog to this magazine of old and new 
chattels. What a change I Instead of 
the masterly good -humour, and sense of 



MAN THE REFORMER, 


pOW^r, and fertility of resource in him- 
self ; instead of those strong and learned 
hands, those piercing and learned eyes, 
that supple body, and that mighty and 
prevailing heart, which the father had, 
whom nature loved and feared, whom 
snow and rain, water and land, beast and 
fish, seemed all to know and to serve, we 
have now a puny, protected person, 
guarded by walls and curtains, stoves and 
down beds, coaches, and men-servants 
and wornen-servants from the earth and the 
sky, and who, bred to depend on all these, 
is made anxious by all that endangers 
those possessions, and is forced to spend 
so much time in guarding them, that he 
has quite lost sight of their original use, 
namely, to help him to his ends — to the 
prosecution of his love ; to the helping of 
his friend, to the worship of his God, to 
the enlargement of his knowledge, to the 
serving of his country, to the indulgence 
of his sentiment, and he is now what is 
called a rich man — the menial and runner 
of his riches. 

Hence it happens that the whole interest 
of history lies in the fortunes of the poor. 
Knowledge, Virtue, Power are the victories 
of man over his necessities, his march to 
the dominion of the world. Every man 
ought to have this opportunity to conquer 
fhe world for himself. Only such persons 
interest us, Spartans, Romans, Saracens, 
English, Americans, who have stood in 
the jaws of need, and have by their own 1 
wit and might extricated themselves, and 
made man victorious. i 

I do not wish to overstate this doctrine 
of labour, or insist that every man should 
be a farmer, any more than that every 
man should be a lexicographer. In gen- 
eral, one may say, that the husbandman’s 
is the oldest, and most universal pro- 
fession, and that where a man does not 
yet discover in himself any fitness for one 
work more than another, this may be pre- 
ferred. But the doctrine of the F'arm is 
merely this, that every man ought to stand 
in primary relations with the work of the 
world, ought to do it himself, and not to 
Buffer the accident of his having a purse 
in his pocket, or his having been bred to 
some dishonourable and injurious craft, 
to sever him from those duties ; and for 
this reason, that labour is God’s educa- 
tion ; that he only is a sincere learner, he 
only can become a master, who learns the 
secrets of labour, and who by real cunning 
extorts from nature its sceptre. 

Neither would I shut my ears to the 
plea of the learned professions, of the 


367 

poet, the priest, the lawgiver, and men of 
study generally ; namely, that in the ex- 
perience of all men of that class, the 
amount of manual labour which is neces- 
sary to the maintenance of a family indis- 
poses and disqualifies for intellectual 
exertion. I know, it often, perhaps 
usually, happens, that where there is a 
fine organization apt for poetry and phi- 
losophy, that individual finds himself 
compelled to wait on his thoughts, to 
waste several days that he may enhance 
and glorify one ; and is better taught by a 
moderate and dainty exercise, such as 
rambling in the fields, rowing, skating, 
hunting, than by the downright drudgery 
of the farmer and the smith. I would not 
quite forget the venerable counsel of the 
Egyptian mysteries, which declared that 
•* there were two pairs of eyes in man, and 
it is requisite that the pair which are be- 
neath should be closed, when the pair 
that are above them perceive, and that 
when the pair above are closed, those 
which are beneath should be opened.” 
Yet I will suggest that no separation from 
labour can be without some loss of power 
and of truth to the seer himself ; that, 
I doubt not, the faults and vices of our 
literature and philosophy, their too great 
fineness, effeminacy, and melancholy, are 
attributable to the enervated and sickly 
habits of the literary class. Better that 
the book should not be quite so good, and 
the bookmaker abler and better, and not 
himself often a ludicrous contrast to all 
that he has written. 

But granting that for ends so sacred and 
dear, some relaxation must be had. I 
think, that if a man finds in himself any 
strong bias to poetry, to art, to the con- 
templative life, drawing him to these 
things with a devotion incompatible with 
good husbandry, that man ought to reckon 
early with himself, and respecthig the 
compensations of the Universe, ought to 
ransom himself from the duties of econo- 
my, by a certain rigour and privation in 
his habits. For privileges so rare and 
grand, let him not stint to pay a great tax. 
Let him be a caenobite, a pauper, and if 
need be, celibate also. Let him learn to 
eat his meals standing, and to relish the 
taste of fair water and black bread. He 
may leave to others the costly convenien- 
cies of housekeeping, and large hospitality, 
and the possession of works of art. Let 
him feel that genius is a hospitality, and 
that be who can create works of art nee^ 
not collect them. He must live in a 
chamber, and postpone his self-indulgenca« 



MIXELLAmSS, 


S63 

forewarned and forearmed against that 
frequent misfortune of men of genius — 
the taste for luxury. This is the tragedy 
of genius— attempting to drive along the 
ecliptic with one horse of the heavens 
and one horse of the earth, there is only 
discord and ruin and downfall to chariot 
and charioteer. 

The duty that every man should assume 
his own vows, should call the institutions 
of society to account, and examine their 
fitness to him, gains in emphasis, if we 
look at our modes of living. Is our 
housekeeping sacred and honourable ? 
Does it raise and inspire us, or does it 
cripple us instead ? I ought to be armed 
by every part and function of my house- 
hold, by all my social function, by my 
economy, by my feasting, by my voting, 
by my traffic. Yet I am almost no party 
to any of these things. Custom does it 
for me, gives me no power therefrom, and 
runs me in debt to boot. We spend our 
incomes for paint and paper, for a hundred 
trifles, I know not what, and not for the 
things of a man. Our expense is almost 
all for conformity. It is for cake that we 
run in debt; ’tis not the intellect, not 
the heart, not beauty, not worship, that 
costs so much. Why needs any man be 
rich ? Why must he have horses, fine 
garments, handsome apartments, access 
to public houses, and places of amuse- 
ment ? Only for want of thought. Give 
his mind a new image, and ho flees into a 
^litary garden or garret to enjoy it, and 
is richer with that dream, than the fee of 
a county could make him. But we are 
first thoughtless, and then find that we are 
moneyless. We are first sensual, and 
then must be rich. We dare not trust our 
wit for making our house pleasant to our 
friend, and so we buy ice-creams. He is 
accustomed to carpets, and we have not 
sufficient character to put floor-cloths out 
of his mind whilst he stays in the house, 
and so we pile the floor with carpets. Let 
the house rather be a temple of the Furies 
of Lacedaemon, formidable and holy to 
all, which none but a Spartan may enter 
or so much as behold. As soon as there 
is faith, as soon as there is society, comfits 
and cushions will be left to slaves. Ex- 
pense will be inventive and heroic. We 
shall eat hard and lie hard, we shall dwell 
like the ancient Romans in narrow tene- 
ments, whilst our public edifices, like 
theirs, will be worthy, for their pro- 
portion, of the landscape in which we 
set them, for conversation, for art, for 
music, for worship. We shall be rich 


to great purposes ! poor only for selfish 

ones. 

Now what help for these evils? How 
can the man who has learned but one art* 
procure all the conveniences of life honest- 
ly ? Shall we say all we think ? Perhaps 
with his own hands. Suppose he collects 
or makes them ill ; yet he has learned 
their lesson. If he cannot do that — then 
perhaps he can go without. Immense 
wisdom and riches are in that. It is 
better to go without, than to have them at 
too great a cost. Let us learn the mean- 
I ing of economy. Economy is a high, 
humane office, a sacrament, when its aim 
is grand ; when it is the prudence of simple 
tastes, when it is practised for freedom, or 
love, or devotion. Much of the economy 
which we see in houses, is of a base 
origin, and is best kept out of sight. 
Parched corn eaten to-day that I may 
have roast fowl to my dinner on Sunday, 
is a baseness ; but parched corn and a 
house with one apartment, that I may be 
free of all perturbations, that I may be 
serene and docile to what the mind shall 
speak, and girt and road-ready for the 
lowest mission of knowledge or good-will, 
is frugality for gods and heroes. 

Can we not learn the lesson of self-help ? 
Society is full of infirm people, who in- 
cessantly summon others to serve them, 
They contrive everywhere to exhaust for 
their single comfort the entire means and 
appliances of that luxury to which our 
invention has yet attained. Sofas, otto- 
mans, stoves, wine, game-fowl, spices, 
perfumes, rides, tho theatre, entertain- 
ments — all these they want, they need, 
and whatever can be suggested more than 
these, they crave also, as if it was the 
bread which should keep them from 
starving ; and if they miss any one, they 
represent themselves as the most wronged 
and most wretched persons on earth. 
One must have been born and bred with 
them to know how to prepare a meal for 
their learned stomach. Meantime, they 
never bestir themselves to serve another 
person ; not they ! they have a great deal 
more to do for themselves than they can 
possibly perform, nor do they once per- 
ceive the cruel joke of their lives, but the 
more odious they grow, the sharper is the 
tone of their complaining and craving. 
Can anything be so elegant as to have few 
wants and to servo them one’s self, so as 
to have somewhat left to give, instead of 
being always prompt to grab ? It is more 
elegant to answer one’s own needs, than 
to be richly senred; inelegant perhaps it 



MAN THE REFORMER. 


may look to-9ay, and to a few, but it if an 

elegance forever and to all. 

I do not wish to be absurd and pedantic 
in reform. I do not wish to push my 
criticism on the state of things around me 
to that #:travagant mark, that shall com- 
pel me to suicide, or to an absolute isola- 
tion from the advantages of civil society. 
If we suddenly plant our foot, and say — I 
will neither eat nor drink, nor wear nor 
touch ary food or fabric which I do not 
know to be innocent, ordeal with any person 
whose whole manner of life is not clear 
and rational, we shall stand still. Whose is 
so ? Not mine ; not thine ; not his. But 
I think we must clear ourselves each one 
by the interrogation, whether we have 
earned our bread to-day by the hearty 
contribution of our energies to the com- 
mon benefit ? and we must not cease to 
tend to the correction of these flagrant 
wrongs, by laying one stone aright every 
day. ! 

But the idea which now begins to agitate 
society has a wider scope than our daily 
employments, our households, and the 
institutions of property. We are to revise 
the whole of our social structure, the state, 
the school, religion, marriage, trade, 
science, and explore their foundations in 
our own nature : we are to see that the 
world not only fitted the former men, but 
fits us, and to clear ourselves of every 
usage which has not its roots in our own 
mind. What is a man born for but to be 
a Reformer, a Re-maker of what man has 
made ; a ^nouncer of lies ; a restorer of 
truth an^iJfeOod, imitating that great Nature 
which embosoms us all, and which sleeps 
no moment on an old past, but every hour 
repairs herself, yielding us every morning 
a new day, and with every pulsation a new 
life? Let him renounce every thing which 
is not true to him, and put all his practices 
back on their first thoughts, and do 
nothing for which he has not the whole 
world for his reason. If there are incon- 
veniences, and what is called ruin in the 
way, because we have so enervated and 
maimed ourselves, yet it would be like 
dying of perfumes to sink in the effort to 
reattach the deeds of every day to the 
holy and mysterious recesses of life. 

The power, which is at once spring and 
fegulator in all efforts of reform, is the 
conviction that there is an infinite worthi- 
ness in man which will appear at the call 
of worth, and that all particular reforms 
are the removing of some impediment. 
If it not the highest duty that man should 
honoured in na ? 1 ought not to allow 


369 

any man, because he has broad lands, to 
feel that he is rich in my presence. I ought 
to make him feel that I can do without his 
riches, that I cannot be bought— neither 
by comfort, neither by pride — and though 
I be utterly penniless, and receiving bread 
from him, that he is the poor man beside 
me. And if, at the same time, a woman 
or a child discovers a sentiment of piety, 
or a juster way of thinking than mine, I 
ought to confess it by my respect and 
obedience, though it go to alter my whole 
way of life. 

The Americans have many virtues, but 
they have not Faith and Hope. I know 
no two words whose meaning is more lost 
sight of. We use these words as if they 
were as obsolete as Selah and Amen, 
And yet they have the broadest meaning, 
and the most cogent application to Boston 
in 1841. The Americans have no faith. 

I They rely on the power of the dollar ; they 
are deaf to a sentiment. They think you 
may talk the north wind down as easily as 
raise society ; and no class more faithless 
than the scholars or intellectual men. 
Now if I talk with a sincere wise man, 
and my friend, with a poet, with a con- 
scientious youth who is still under the 
dominion of his own wild thoughts, and 
not yet harnessed in the team of society 
to drag with us all in the ruts of custom, 
I see at once how paltry is all this genera- 
tion of unbelievers, and what a house of 
cards their institutions are, and I see 
what one brave man, what one great 
thought executed might effect. I see that 
the reason of the distrust of the practical 
man in all theory, is his inability to per- 
ceive the means whereby we work. Look, 
he says, at the tools with which this world 
of yours is to be built. As we cannot 
make a planet, with atmosphere, rivers, 
and forests, by means of the best carpen- 
ters’ or engineers’ tools, with chemist’s 
laboratory and smith’s forge to boot— so 
neither can we ever construct that heaven- 
ly society you prate of, out of foolish, sick, 
selfish men and women, such as we know 
them to be. But the believer not only 
beholds his heaven to be possible, but 
already to begin to exist — not by the men 
or materials the statesman uses, but by 
men transfigured and raised above them- 
selves by the power of principles. To 
principles something else is possible that 
transcends all the power of expedients. 

Every great and commanding moment 
in the annals of the world is the triumph 
of some enthusiasm. The victories of the 
Arabs aUber Mahomet, who, in a few 



MISCELLANIES. 


570 

years, from a small and mean beginning, 
established a larger empire than that of 
Rome, is an example. They did they 
knew not what. The naked Derar, horsed 
on an idea, was found an overmatch for a 
troop of Roman cavalry. The women 
fought like men, and conquered the Roman 
men. They were miserably equipped, 
miserably fed. They were Temperance 
troops. There was neither brandy nor 
flesh needed to feed them. They con- 
quered Asia, and Africa, and Spain, on 
barley. The Caliph Omar’s walking-stick 
struck more terror into those who saw it, 
than another man’s sword. His diet was 
barley bread ; his sauce was salt ; and 
oftentimes by way of abstinence he ate 
his bread without salt. His drink was 
water. His palace was built of mud ; and 
when he left Medina to go to the conquest 
of Jerusalem, he rode on a red camel, 
with a wooden platter hanging at his 
saddle, with a bottle of water and two 
sacks, one holding barley, and the other 
dried fruits. 

But there will dawn ere long on our 
politics, on our modes of living, a nobler 
morning than that Arabian faith, in the 
sentiment of love. This is the one remedy 
for all ills, the panacea of nature. We 
must be lovers, and at once the impossible 
becomes possible. Our age and history, 
for these thousand years, has not been the 
history of kindness, but of selfishness. 
Our distrust is very expensive. The money 
we spend for courts and prisons is very ill 
laid out. We make, by distrust, the thief, 
and burglar, and incendiary, and by our 
court and jail we keep him so. An ac- 
ceptance of the sentiment of love through- 
out Christendom for a season, would bring 
the felon and the outcast to our side in 
teaurs, with the devotion of his faculties to 
our service. See this wide society of 
labouring men and women. We allow 
ourselves to be served by them, we live 
apart from them, and meet them without 
a salute in the streets. We do not greet 
their talents, nor rejoice in their good 
fortune, nor foster their hopes, nor in the 
assembly of the people vote for what is 
dear to them. Thus we enact the part of 
the selfish noble and king from the foun- 
dation of the world. See, this tree always 
bears one fruit. In every household, the 
peace of a pair is poisoned by the malice, 
alyness, indolence, and alienation of do- 
mestics. Let any two matrons meet, and 
observe how soon their conversation turns 
on the troubles from their " help,” as our 
phrase is. In every knot of labourers, 


the rich man does not feel himself among 
his friends— and at the polls he finds them 
arrayed in a mass in distinct opposition to 
him. We complain that the politics of 
masses of the people are controlled by de- 
signing men, and led in opposition to 
manifest justice and the common weal, 
and to their own interest. But the people 
do not wish to be represented or ruled by 
the ignorant and base. They only vote 
for these, because they were asked with 
the voice and semblance of kindness. 
They will not vote for them long. They 
inevitably prefer wit and probity. To use 
an Egyptian metaphor, it is not their will 
for any long time “ to raise the nails of 
wild beasts, and to depress the heads of 
the sacred birds.” Let our affection flow 
out to our fellows ; it would operate in a day 
the greatest of all revolutions. It is better 
to work on institutions by the sun than by 
the wind. The state must consider the 
poor man, and all voices must speak for 
him. Every child that is born must have 
a just chance for his bread. Let the 
amelioration in our laws of property pro- 
ceed from the concession of the rich, not 
from the grasping of the poor. Let us 
begin by habituM imparting. Let us 
understand that the equitable rule is, 
that no one should take more than his 
share, let him be ever so rich. Let me 
feel that I am to bo a lover. I am to see 
to it that the world is the better for me, 
and to find my reward in the act. Love 
would put a new face on this weary old 
world in which we dwell as pagans and 
enemies too long, and it would warm the 
heart to see how fast the vain diplomacy 
of statesmen, the impotence of armies, 
and navies, and lines of defence, would be 
superseded by this unarmed child. Love 
will creep where it cannot go, will accom- 
plish that by imperceptible methods — 
being its own lever, fulcrum, and power — 
which force could never achieve. Hava 
you not seen in the woods, in a late 
autumn morning, a poor fungus or mush- 
room— a plant without any solidity, nay, 
that seemed nothing but a soft mush or 
jelly — by its constant, total, and incon- 
ceivably gentle pushing, manage to break 
its way up through the frosty ground, and 
actually to lift a hard crust on its head ? 
It is the symbol of the power of kindness. 
The virtue of this principle in human- 
society in application to great interests is 
obsolete and forgotten. Once or twice in 
history it has been tried in illustrious in* 
stances, with signal success. This great, 
overgrown, dead Christendom of ours stiU 



LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


keeps alivo at least the name of a lover of 
mankind. But one day all men will be 
lovers; and every calamity will be dis- 
solved in the universal sunshine. 

Will you suffer me to add one trait more 
to this portrait of man the reformer ? The 
mediator between the spiritual and the 
actual world should have a great pro- 
spective prudence. An Arabian poet de- 
scribes his hero by saying, 

“ Sunshine was he 
In the winter day ; 

And in the midsummer 
Coolness and shade.’* 

He who would help himself and others, 
should not be a subject of irregular and i 
interrupted impulses of virtue, but a con- 
tinent, persistent, immovable person — 
such as we have seen a few scattered up 
and down in time for the blessing of the 
world ; men who have in the gravity of 
their nature a quality which answers to 
the fly-wheel in a mill, which distributes 
the motion equably over all the wheels, 
and hinders it from falling unequally and 
suddenly in destructive shocks. It is 
better that joy should be spread over all 
the day in the form of strength, than that 


373f 

it should be concentratea into ectasies, 
full of danger and followed by reactions. 
There is a sublime prudence, which is the 
very highest that we know of man, which, 
believing in a vast future — sure of more to 
come than is yet seen — postpones always 
the present hour to the whole life ; post- 
pones talent to genius, and special results 
to character. As the merchant gladly 
takes money from his income to add to 
his capital, so is the great man willing to 
lose particular powers and talents, so that 
he gain in the elevation of his life. The 
opening of the spiritual senses disposes 
men ever to greater sacrifices, to leave 
their signal talents, their means and skill 
of procuring apresent success, their power 
and their fame — to cast all things behind, 
in the insatiable thirst for divine com- 
munications. A purer fame, a greater 
power rewards the sacrifice. It is the 
conversion of our harvest into seed. As 
the farmer casts into the ground the finest 
ears of his grain, the time will come when 
we too shall hold nothing back, but shall 
eagerly convert more than now possess 
into means and powers, when v/e shall be 
willing to sow the sua aad the moon for 
seeds. 


LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


Read at the Masonic Temple, Boston, December 2, 1841. 


The Times, as we say — or the present 
aspects of our social state, the Laws, 
Divinity, Natural Science, Agriculture, 
Art, Trade, Letters— have their root in an 
invisible spiritual reality. To appear in 
these aspects, they must first exist, or 
have some necessary foundation. Beside 
all the small reasons we assign, there is a 
great reason for the existence of every 
extant fact; a reason which lies grand and 
immovable, often unsuspected behind it 
in silence. The Times are the masquerade 
of the eternities ; trivial to the dull, 
tokens of noble and majestic agents to 
the wise ; the receptacle in which the 
Past leaves its history ; the quarry out of 
which the genius of to-day is building up 
the Future. The Times— the nations, 
manners, institutions, opinions, votes, are 
to be studied as omens, as sacred leaves, 
whereon a weighty sense is inscribed, if 
he have the wit and the love to search it 
out. Naturo it3$lf seems to propound to 


us this topic, and to invite us to explore 
the meaning of the conspicuous facts of 
the day. Everything that is popular, it 
has been said, deserves the attention of 
the philosopher : and this for the obvious 
reason, that although it may not be of 
any worth in itself, yet it characterizes 
the people. 

Here is very good matter to be handled, 
if we are skilful ; an abundance of import- 
ant practical questions which it behoves us 
to understand. Let us examine the preten- 
tions of the attacking and defending parties. 
Here is this great fact of Conservatism, 
intrenched in its immense redoubts, with 
Himmaleh for its front, and Atlas for its 
flank, and Andes for its rear, and the At- 
lantic and Pacific seas for its ditches and 
trenches, which has planted its crosses, 
and crescents, and stars and stripes, and 
various signs and badges of possession, 
over every rood of the planet, and lays 
' I will hol^ fast; and tQ whom I will, wiU 



MISCELLANIES. 


57 * 

1 give*, and whom 1 will, will 1 exclude 
and starve : ’ so says Conservatism ; and 
all the children of men attack the colossus 
in their youth, and all, or all but a few, 
bow before it when they are old. A 
necessity not yet commanded, a negative 
imposed on the will of man by his con- 
dition, a deficiency in his force, is the 
foundation on which it rests. Let this 
side be fairly stated. Meantime, on the 
other part, arises Reform, and offers the 
sentiment of Love as an overmatch to 
this material might. I wish to consider 
well this affirmative side, which has a 
loftier port and reason than heretofore, 
which encroaches on the other every day, 
puts it out of countenance, out of reason, 
and out of temper, and leaves it nothing 
but silence and possession. 

The fact of aristocracy, with its two 
weapons of wealth and manners, is as 
commanding a feature of the nineteenth 
century, and the American republic, as of 
old Rome or modem England. The 
reason and influence of wealth, the aspect 
of philosophy and religion, and the tend- 
encies which have acquired the name of 
Transcendentalism in Old and New Eng- 
land ; the aspect of poetry, as the exponent 
and interpretation of these things; the 
fuller development and the freer play of 
Character as a social and political agent ; 
— these and other related topics will in 
turn come to be considered. 

But the subject of the Times is not an 
abstract question. We talk of the world, 
but we mean a few men and women. If you 
speak of the age, you mean your own 
platoon of people, as Milton and Dante 
painted in colossal their platoons, and 
called them Pleaven and Hell. In our 
idea of progress, we do not go out of this j 
personal picture. We do not tlijnk the { 
sky will be bluer, or honey sweeter, or 
our climate more temperate, but only that 
our relation to our fellows will be simpler 
and happier. What is the reason to be 
given for this extreme attraction which 
persons have for us, but that they are the 
Age? they are the results of the Past; 
they are the heralds of the Future. They 
indicate — these witty, suffering, blushing, 
intimidating figures of the only race in 
which they are individuals or changes — 
how far on the Fate has gone, and what it 
drives at. As trees make scenery, and 
constitute the hospitality of the landscape, 
so persons are the world to persons. A 
cunning mystery by which the Great 
Desert of thoughts and of planets takes 
this engaging fonn, to bring, m it would 


seem, its meanings nea»pr to the mind. 
Thoughts walk and speak, aura look with 
eyes at me, and transport mo into new 
and magnificent scenes. These are the 
pungent instructors who thrill the heart of 
each of us, and make all other teaching 
formal and cold. How I follow them with 
aching heart, with pining desire I I count 
myself nothing before them. I would die 
for them with joy. They can do what 
they will with me. Ho^^ they lash us with 
those tongues ! How they make the tears 
start, make us blush and turn pale, and 
lap us in Elysium to soothing dreams, and 
castles in the air. By tones of triumph ; 
of dear love ; by threats ; by pride that 
freezes ; these have the skill to make the 
world look bleak and inhospitable, or seem 
the nest of tenderness and joy. I do not 
wonder at the miracles which poetry 
attributes to the music of Orpheus, when 
I remember what I have experienced 
from the varied notes of the human voice. 
They are an incalculable energy which 
countervails all other forces in nature, be- 
cause they are the channel of supernatural 
powers There is no interest or institu- 
tion fso poor and withered, but if a new 
strong man could be bom into it, he 
would immediately redeem and replace 
it. A personal ascendency — that is the 
only fact much worth considering. I re^ 
member, some years ago, somebody 
shocked a circle of friends of order here 
in Boston, who supposed that our people 
were identified with their religious denom- 
inations, by declaring that an eloquent 
man — let him be of what sect soever — ^ 
would be ordained at once in one of our 
metropolitan churches. To be sure he 
would ; and not only in ours, but in any 
church, mosque, or temple on the planet I 
but he must be eloquent, able to supplant 
our method and classification, by the 
superior beauty of his own. Every face 
we have was brought here by some person*; 
and there is none that will not change 
and pass away before a person, whose 
nature is broader than the person whom 
the fact in question represents. And so I 
find the age walking about in happy and 
hopeful natures, in strong eyes and pleas- 
ant thoughts, and think I read it nearer 
and truer so, than in the statute-book, or in 
the investments of capital, which rather 
celebrate with mournful music the oDse- 
quies of the last age. In the brain of a 
fanatic ; in the wild hope of a mountain 
boy, called by city boys very ignorant, 
because they do not know wljat his hope 
has certainly apprised him shall be; in 



LECTURE ON 

tile love-glance of a girl ; in the hair-split- 
ting conscientiousness of some eccentric 
person, who has found some new scruple 
to embarrass himself and his neighbours 
withal I is to be found that which shall 
constitute the times to come, more than 
in the now organised and accredited 
oracles. For whatever is affirmative and 
now advancing contains it. I think that 
only is real, which men love and rejoice 
in ; not what they tolerate, but what they 
choose ; what they embrace and avow, 
and not the things which chill, be- 
numb, and terrify them. 

And so why not draw for these times a 
portrait-gallery ? Let us paint the painters. 
Whilst the Dagiierreotypist, with camera- 
obscura and silver plate, begins now to 
traverse the land, let us set up our Camera 
also, and let the sun paint the people. 
Let us paint the agitator, and the man of 
the old school, and the member of Con- 
gress, and the college professor, the 
formidable editor, the priest, and reformer, 
the contemplative girl, and the fair aspir- 
ant for fashion and opportunities, the 
woman of the world who has tried and 
knows — let us examine how well she 
knows. Could we indicate the indicators, 
indicate those who most accurately repre- 
sent every good and evil tendency of the 
general mind, in the just order which they 
take on this canvas of Time ; so that all 
witnesses should recognise a spiritual law, 
as each well-known form flitted for a 
moment across the wall, we should have a 
series of sketches which would report to 
the next ages the colour and quality of 
ours. 

Certainly, I think, if this were done, there 
would be much to admire as well as to 
condemn ; souls of as lofty a port, as any 
in Greek or Roman fame, might appear : 
men of great heart, of strong hand, and of 
persuasive speech ; subtle thinkers, and 
men of wide sympathy, and an apprehen- 
sion which looks over all history, and 
everywhere recognises its own. To be 
sure, there will be fragments and hints of 
men, more than enough ; bloated promises 
which end in nothing or little. And then, 
truly great men, but with some defect in 
their composition, which neutralises their 
whole force. Hero is a general without a 
command, a Damascus blade, such as you 
may search through nature in vain to par- 
allel, laid up on the shelf in some village 
to rust and ruin. And how many seem 
not quite available for that idea which 
they represent I Now and then comes a 
bolder spirit* X should rather say, a more 


THE TIMES. 373 

surrendered soul, more Infox me^ and led 
by Gk>d, which is much in advance of the 
rest, quite beyond their sympathy, but 
predicts what shall soon be the general 
fulness; as when we stand by the sea- 
shore, whilst the tide is coming in, a wave 
comes up the beach far higher than any 
foregoing one, and recedes ; and for a long 
while none comes up to that mark ; but 
after some time the whole sea is there and 
beyond it. 

But we are not permitted to stand as 
spectators of the pageant which the times 
exhibit ; we are parties also, and have a 
responsibility which is not to be declined. 
A little while this interval of wonder and 
comparison is permitted us, but to the end 
that we shall play a manly part. As the 
solar system moves forward in the heavens, 
certain stars open before us, and certain 
stars close up behind us ; so is man’s life. 
The reputations that were great and inac- 
cessible change and tarnish. How great 
were once Lord Bacon’s dimensions ! he 
isjnow reduced almost to the middle height; 
and many another star has turned out to be 
a planet or an asteroid : only a few are the 
fixed stars which have no parallax, or 
none for us. The change and decline of 
old reputations are the gracious marks of 
our own growth. Slowly, like light of 
morning, it steals on us, the new fact, that 
we, who were pupils or aspirants, are now 
society : do compose a portion of that 
head and heart we are wont to think 
worthy of all reverence and heed, Wa 
are the representatives of religion and 
intellect, and stand in the light of Ideas, 
whose rays stream through us to those 
younger and more in the dark. What 
further relations we sustain, what new 
lodges we are entering, is now unknown. 
To-day is a king in disguise. To-day 
always looks mean to the thoughtless, in 
the face of an uniform experience, that all 
good and great and happy actions are 
made up precisely of these blank to-days. 
Let us not be so deceived. Let us unmask 
the king as he passes. Let us not inhabit 
times of wonderful and various promise 
without divining their tendency. Let us 
not see the foundations of nations, and of 
a new and better order of things laid, wi^ 
roving eyes, and an attention preoccupied 
with trifles. 

The two omnipresent parties of History, 
the party of the Past and the party of the 
Future, divide society to-day as of old. 
Here is the innumerable multitude of 
those who accept the state and the church 
fxgm th^ last sen^ratiga, and stand oa no 



MISCELLANIES. 


374 

urgument but possession. They have 
reason also, and, as I think, better reason 
than is commonly stated. No Burke, no 
Mettemich, has yet done full justice to the 
side of conservatism. But this class, how- 
ever large, relying not on the intellect but 
on instinct, blends itself with the brute 
forces of nature, is respectable only as 
nature is, but the individuals have no 
attraction for us. It is the dissenter, the 
theorist, the aspirant, who is quitting this 
ancient domain to embark on seas of 
adventure, who engages our interest. 
Omitting then for the present all notice j 
of the stationary class, we shall find that 
the movement party divides itself into two 
classes, the actors and the students. 

The actors constitute that great army of 
martyrs who, at least in America, by their 
conscience and philanthropy, occupy the 
ground which Calvinism occupied in the 
last age, and compose the visible church 
of the existing generation. The present 
age will be marked by its harvest of pro- 
jects for. the reform of domestic, civil, 
literary, and ecclesiastical insti tutions. 
The leaders of the crusades against War, 
Negro slavery. Intemperance, Government 
based on force. Usages of trade. Court and 
Custom-house Oaths, and so on to the 
agitators on the system of Education and 
the laws of Property, are the right succes- 
sors of Luther, Knox, Robinson, Fox, 
I’enn, Wesley, and Whitfield. They have 
the same virtues and vices ; the same 
noble impulse, and the same bigotry. 
These movements are on all accounts im- 
portant ; they not only check the special 
abuses, but they educate the conscience 
and the intellect of the people# How can 
such a question as the Slave-trade be 
agitated for forty years by all the Christain 
nations, without throwing great light on 
ethics into the general mind ? The fury, 
with which the slave-trader defends every 
inch of his bloody deck, and his howling 
auction-platform, is a trumpet to alarm 
the ear of mankind, to wake the dull, and 
drive all neutrals to take sides, and to 
listen to the argument and the verdict. 
The Temperance question, which rides the 
conversation of ten thousand circles, and 
is tacitly recalled at every public and at 
every private table, drawing with it all the 
curious ethics of the Pledge, of the Wine- 
question, of the equity of the manufacture 
and the trade, is a gymnastic training to the 
casuistry and conscience of the time. Anti- 
masonry had a deep right and wrong, 
which gradually emerged to sight out of 
Ihe turbid controversy. The political 


questions touching the Banks ; the Tariff! 
the limits of the executive power; the 
right of the constituent to instruct the 
representative ; the treatment of the 
Indians ; the Boundary wars ; the Con- 
gress of nations are all pregnant with 
ethical conclusions ; and it is well if 
government and our social order can 
extricate themselves from these alembics, 
and find themselves still government and 
social order. The student of history will 
hereafter compute the singular value of 
our endless discussion of questions, to the 
mind of the period. 

Whilst each of these aspirations and at- 
tempts of the people for the Better is 
magnified by the natural exaggeration of 
its advocates, until it excludes the other* 
from sight, and repels discreet persons 
by the unfairness of the plea, the move- 
ments are in reality all parts of one move- 
ment. There is a perfect chain — see it# 
or see it not — of reforms emerging from 
the surrounding darkness, each cherishing 
some part of the general idea, and all 
must be seen, in order to do justice to 
any one. Seen in this their natural con- 
nection, they are sublime. The conscience 
of the Age demonstrates itself in this 
effort to raise the life of man by putting 
it in harmony with his idea of the Beauti- 
ful and the Just. The history of reform 
is always identical ; it is the comparison 
of the idea with the fact. Our modes of 
living are not agr'^blo to our imagina- 
tion. We suspect they are unworthy. 
We arraign our daily employments. They 
appear to us unfit, unworthy of the facul- 
ties we spend on them. In conversation 
with a wise man, we find ourselves apolo- 
gising for our employments ; we speak of 
them with shame. Nature, literature, 
science, childhood, appear to us beautiful ; 
but not our own daily work, not the ripe 
fruit and considered labours of man. 
This beauty which the fancy finds iC 
everything else, certainly accuses that 
manner of life we lead. Why should it 
be hateful ? Why should it contrast thus 
with all natural beauty ? Why should it 
not be poetic, and invite and raise us ? 
Is there a necessity that the works of man 
should be sordid ? Perhaps not. Out of 
this fair Idea in the mind springs the effort 
at the Perfect. It is the interior testimony 
to a fairer possibility of life and manners, 
which agitates society every day with the 
offer of some new amendment. If wa 
would make more strict inquiry concern- 
ing its origin, we find ourselves rapidly 
approaching the inner boundariee m 



LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


thought, that term where speech becomes 
silence, and silence conscience. For the 
origin of all reform is in that mysterious 
fountain of the moral sentiment in man, 
which amidst the natural, ever contains 
the supernatural for men. That is new 
and creative. That is alive. That alone 
can make a man other than he is. Here 
or nowhere resides unbounded energy, 
unbounded power. 

The new voices in the wilderness crying 

Repent,” have revived a hope, which 
had wellnigh perished out of the world, 
that the thoughts of the mind may yet, 
in some distant age, in some happy hour, 
be executed by the hands. That is the 
hope, of which all other hopes are parts. 
For some ages these ideas have been con- 
signed to the poet and musical composer, 
to the prayers and the sermonsof churches; j 
but the thought, that they can ever have 
any footing in real life, seems long since j 
to have been exploded by all judicious per- 
sons. Milton, in his best tract, describes 
a relation between religion and the daily 
occupations, which is true until this time. 

” A wealthy man, addicted to his pJea- 
(Sure and to his profits, finds religion to be 
a traffic so entangled, and of so many 
piddling accounts, that of all mysteries 
be cannot skill to keep a stock going upon 
that trade. What should he do? Fain 
he would have the name to be religious ; 
fain he would bear up with his neighbours 
in that. What does he, therefore, but 
resolve to give over toiling, and to find 
himself out some factor, to whose care 
and credit he may commit the whole 
managing of his religious affairs; some 
divine of note and estimation that must 
be. To him he adheres, resigns the whole 
warehouse of his religion, with all the 
locks and keys, into his custody; and 
indeed makes the very person of that man 
his religion ; esteems his associating with 
him a sufficient evidence and commenda- 
tory of his own piety. So that a man may 
say, his religion is now no more within 
himself, but is become a dividual movable, 
and goes and comes near him, according 
as that good man frequents the house. 
He entertains him, gives him gifts, feasts 
him, lodges him : his religion comes home 
at night, prays, is liberally supped, and 
sumptuously laid to sleep, rises, is saluted, 
and after the malmsey, or some well- 
spiced beverage, and better breakfasted 
than ho whose morning appetite would 
have gladly fed on green figs between ' 
Bethany and Jerusalem, his religion walks j 
abroad at eight, and leaves bis kind enter- 1 


37S 

tainer in the shop, trading all day without 
his religion.” 

This picture would serve for our times. 
Religion was not invited to eat or drink 
or sleep with us, or to make or divide an 
estate, but was a holiday guest. Such 
omissions judge the church ; as the com- 
I promise made with the slaveholder, not 
! much noticed at first, every day appears 
more flagrant mischief to the American 
Constitution. But now the purists are 
looking into all these matters. The more 
intelligent are growing uneasy on the 
subject of Marriage. They wish to see 
the character represented also in that 
covenant. There shall be nothing brutal 
in it, but it shall honour the man and the 
woman as much as the most diffusive and 
universal action. Grimly the same spirit 
looks into the law of Property, and accuses 
men of driving a trade in the great bound- 
less providence which had given the air, 
the water, and the land to men, to use 
and not to fence in and monopolise. It 
casts its eyes on Trade, and Day Labour, 
and so it goes up and down, paving the 
earth with eyes, destroying privacy, and 
making thorough lights. Is this all for 
nothing ? Do you suppose that the re- 
forms, which are preparing, will be as 
superficial as those we know ? 

By the books it reads and translates, 
judge what books it will presently print. 
A great deal of the profoundest thinking 
of antiquity, which had become as good 
as obsolete for us, is now reappearing in 
extracts and allusions, and in twenty years 
will get all printed anew. See how daring 
is the reading, the speculation, the experi- 
menting of the time. If now some genius 
shall arise who could unite these scattered 
rays 1 And always such a genius does 
embody the ideas of each time. Here is 
great variety and richness of mysticism, 
each part of which now only disgusts, 
whilst it forms the sole thought of some 
poor Perfectionist or ” Comer out,” yer, 
when it shall be taken up as the garniture 
of some profound and all-reconciling 
thinker, will appear the rich and appro- 
priate decoration of his robes. 

These reforms are our contemporaries ; 
they are ourselves; our own light, and 
sight, and conscience ; they only name the 
relation which subsists between us and 
the vicious institutions which they go to 
rectify. They are the simplest statements 
of man in these matters; the plain right 
and wrong. I cannot choose but allow 
and honour them, The impulse is good, 
aud the theory; the practice is lesji 

2 U 



MISCELLANIES, 


576 

>eautiful. The Reformers affirm the in- 
ward life, but they do not trust it, but use 
outward and vulgar means. They do not 
rely on precisely that strength which wins 
me to their cause ; not on love, not on a 
principle, but on men, on multitudes, on 
circumstances, on money, on party ; that 
is, on fear, on wrath, and pride. The love 
which lifted men to the sight of these 
better ends, was the true and best dis- 
tinction of this time, the disposition to 
trust a principle more than a material 
force. I think that the soul of reform ; 
the conviction, that not sensualism, not 
slavery, not war, not imprisonment, not 
even government, are needed — but in lieu 
of them all, reliance on the sentiment of 
man, which will work best the more it is 
trusted; not reliance on numbers, but 
contrariwise, distrust of numbers, and the 
feeling that then are we strongest, when 
most private and alone. The young men, 
who have been vexing society for these 
last years with regenerative methods, seem 
to have made this mistake ; they all ex- 
aggerated some special means, and all 
failed to see that the Reform of Reforms 
must be accomplished without means. 

The Reforms have their high origin in 
an ideal justice, but they do not retain the 
purity of an idea. They are quickly 
organized in some low, inadequate form, 
and present no more poetic image to the 
mind, than the evil tradition which they 
reprobated. They mix the fire of the 
moral sentiment with personal and party 
heats, with measureless exaggerations, 
and the blindness that prefers some dar- 
ling measure to justice and truth. Those 
who are urging with most ardour what are 
called the greatest benefits of mankind, 
are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited men, 
and affect us as the insane do. They bite 
us, and we run mad also. I think the 
work of the reformer as innocent as other 
work that is done around him ; but when 
\ have seen it near, I do not like it better. 
It is done in the same way, it is done pro- 
fanely, not piously; by management, by 
tactics, and clamour. It is a buzz in the 
ear. I cannot feel any pleasure in sacri- 
fices which display to me such partiality 
of character. We do not want actions, but 
men ; not a chemical drop of water, but 
rain; the spirit that sheds and showers 
actions, countless, endless actions. You 
have on some occasion played a bold part. 
You have set your heart and face against 
society, when you thought it wrong, and 
returned it frown for frown. Excellent : 
now can you afford to forget it, reckoning 


all your action no more than the passing 
of your hand through the air, or a litde 
breath of your mouth 7 The world leaves 
no track in space, and the greatest action 
of man no mark in the vast idea. To the 
youth diffident of his ability, and full of 
compunction at his unprofitable existence 
the temptation is always great to lend 
himself to public movements, and as one 
of a party accomplish what he cannot 
hope to effect alone. But he must resist 
the degradation of a man to a measure. I 
must act with truth, though I should 
never come to act, as you call it, with 
effect I must consent to inaction. A 
patience which is grand ; a bravo and 
cold neglect of the offices which prudence 
exacts, so it be done in a deep piety ; a 
consent to solitude and inaction, which 
proceeds out of an unwillingness to violate 
character, is the century which makes the 
gem. Whilst therefore I desire to express 
the respect and joy I feel before this 
i sublime connection of reforms, now in 
j their infancy around us, I urge the more 
earnestly the paramount duties of self- 
reliance. I cannot find language of suffi- 
cient energy to convey my sense of the 
sacredness of private integrity. All men, 
all things, the State, the Church, yea the 
friends of the heart, are phantasms and 
unreal beside the sanctuary of the heart 
With so much awe, with so much fear, 
let it be respected. 

The great majority of men, unable to 
judge of any principle until its light falls 
on a fact, are not aware of the evil that is 
around them, until they see it in some 
gross form, as in a class of intemperate 
men, or slaveholders, or soldiers, or fraud- 
ulent persons. Then they are greatly 
moved ; and magnifying the importance of 
that wrong, they fancy that if that abuse 
were redressed, all would go well, and 
they fill the land with clamour to correct 
it. ^ Hence the missionary and other "re- 
ligious efforts. If every island and every 
house had a Bible, if every child was 
brought into the Sunday School, would 
the wounds of the world heal, and man be 
upright ? 

But the man of ideas accounting the 
circumstance nothing, judges of the com- 
mon-wealth from the state of his own mind. 
* If,’ he says, ‘ I am selfish, then is there 
slavery, or the effort to establish it, wher- 
ever I go. But if I am just, then is there 
no slavery, let the laws say what they will. 
For if I treat all men as gods, how to me 
can there be any such thing as a slave ? * 
But bQw frivolous is your war against 



LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


Circumstances. This denouncing philan- 
thropist is himself a slaveholder in every 
word and look. Does he free me ? Does 
he cheer me ? He is the State of Georgia, 
or Alabama, with their sanguinary slave- 
laws walking hero on our Northeastern 
shores. We are all thankful he has no 
more political power, as we are fond of 
liberty ourselves. I am afraid our virtue 
is a little geographical. I am not mortified 
by our vice ; that is obduracy ; it colours 
and palters, it curses and swears, and I can 
see to the end of it ; but, I own, our virtue 
makes me ashamed ; so sour and narrow, 
so thin and blind, virtue so vice-like. 
Then again,. how trivial seem the contests 
of the abolitionists, whilst he aims merely 
at the circumstance of the slave. Give 
the slave the least elevation of religious 
sentiment, and he is no slave ; you are 
the slave ; he not only in his humility feels 
his superiority, feels that much-deplored 
condition of his to be a fading trifle, but 
he makes you feel it too. He is the master. 
The exaggeration, which our young people 
make of his wrongs, characterises them- 
selves. What are no trifles to them, they 
naturally think are no trifles to Pompey, 

We say, then, that the reforming move- 
ment is sacred in its origin ; in its manage- 
ment and details timid and profane. 
These benefactors hope to raise man by 
improving his circumstances; by combin- 
ation of that which is dead, they hope to 
make something alive. In vain. By new 
infusions alone of the spirit by which he 
is made and directed, can he be re-made 
and reinforced. The sad Pestalozzi, who 
shared with all ardent spirits the hope of 
Europe on the outbreak of the French 
Revolution, after witnessing its sequel, 
recorded his conviction, that “the ame- 
lioration of outward circumstances will be 1 
the effect, but can never be the means of 
mental and moral improvement,” Quit- 
ting now the class of actors, let us turn 
to see how it stands with the other class 
of which we spoke, namely the students. 

A new disease has fallen on the life of 
man. Every age, like every human body, 
has its own distemper. Other times have 
had war, or famine, or a barbarism domestic 
orbordering, as their antagonism. Our 
fore-fathers walked in the world and went 
to their graves, tormented with the fear of 
Sin, and the terror of the Day of Judg- 
ment. These terrors have lost their force, 
and our torment is Unbelief, the Uncer- 
tainty as to what we ought to do ; the 
distrust of the value of what we do, and the 
distrust that the Necesity (which we all at 


377 

last believe in) is fair and beneficent. Out 
Religion assumes the negative form of re* 
jection. Out of love of the true, we 
repudiate the false ; and the Religion is an 
abolishing criticism. A great perplexity 
hangs like a cloud on the brow of all 
cultivated persons, a certain imbecility in 
the best spirits, which distinguishes the 
period. We do not find the same trait 
in the Arabian, in the Hebrew, in Greek, 
Roman, Norman, English periods; no, 
but in other men a natural firmness. The 
men did not see beyond the need of the 
hour. They planted their foot strong, and 
doubted nothing. We mistrust every step 
we take. We find it the worst thing about 
time, that we know not what to do with 
it. We are so sharp-sighted that we can 
neither work nor think, neither read Plato 
nor not read him. 

Then there is what is called a loo 
intellectual tendency. Can there be too 
much intellect ? We have never met 
with any such excess. But the criticism, 
which is levelled at the laws and manners, 
ends in thought, without causing a new 
method of life. The genius of the day 
does not decline to a deed, but to a behold- 
ing. It is not that men do not wish to 
act; they pine to be employed, but are 
paralysed by the uncertainty what they 
should do. The inadequacy of the work 
to the faculties is the painful perception 
I which keep them still. This happens to 
the best. Then, talents bring their usual 
temptations, and the current literature 
I and poetry with perverse ingenuity draw 
us away from life to solitude and medita- 
tion. This could well be borne, if it were 
great and involuntary; if the men were 
ravished by their thought, and hurried into 
ascetic extravagances. Society could 
then manage to release their shoulder 
from its wheel, and grant them for a time 
this privilege of sabbath. But they are 
not so. Thinking which was a rage, is be- 
come an art, The thinker gives me 
results, and never invites me to be present 
with him at his invocation of truth, and 
to enjoy with him its proceeding into his 
mind. 

So little action amidst such audacious 
and yet sincere profession, that we begin 
to doubt if that great revolution in the art 
of war, which has made it a game of posts 
t instead of a game of battles, has not 
operated on Reform ; whether this be not 
also a war of posts, a paper blockade, in 
which each party is to display the utmost 
resources of his spirit and belief, and no 
conflict occur; but the world shall tako 



MISCELLANIES. 


378 

that course which the demonstration of 
the truth shall indicate. 

But we must pay for being too intellec- 
tual, as they call it. People are not as 
light-hearted for it. I think men never 
loved life less. I question if care and 
doubt ever wrote their names so legibly on 
the faces of any population. This Ennui, 
for which we Saxons had no name, this 
word of France has got a terrific signi- 
ficance. It shortens life, and bereaves the 
day of its light. Old age begins in the nur- 
sery, and before the young American is 
put into jacket and trousers, he says, * I 
want something which I never saw before ; ’ 
and ‘ I wish I was not I.* I have seen the 
same gloom on the brow even of those 
adventurers from the intellectual class, 
who had dived deepest and with most 
success into active life. I have seen the 
autlientic sign of anxiety and perplexity 
on the greatest forehead of the state. 
The canker-worms have crawded to the 
topmost bough of the wild elm, and swing 
down from that. Is there less oxygen in 
the atmosphere ? What has checked in 
tliis age the animal spirits which gave to 
our forefathers their bounding pulse ? 

But have a little patience with this 
melancholy humour. Their unbelief arises 
out of a greater Belief ; their inaction out 
of a scorn of inadequate action. By the 
side of these men, the hot agitators have a 
certain cheap and ridiculous air; they 
even look smaller than the others. Of 
the two, I own, I like the speculators best. 
They have some piety which looks with 
faith to a fair Future, unprofaned by rash 
and unequal attempts to realize it. And 
truly we shall find much to console us, 
when we consider the cause of their un- 
easiness. It is the love of greatness, it is 
the need of harmony, the contrast of the 
dwarfish Actual with the exorbitant Idea. 
No man can compare the ideas and aspi- 
rations of tho innovators of the present 
day with those of former periods, without 
feeling how great and high this criticism 
is. The revolutions that impend over 
society are not now from ambition and 
rapacity, from impatience of one or 
another form of government, but from new 
modes of thinking, which shall recompose 
society after a new order, which shall 
animate labour by lore and science, which 
shall destroy the value of many kinds of 
property, and replace all property within 
the dominion of reason and equity. There 
was never so great a thought labouring in 
the breasts of men as now. It almost 
Hems M if what waa afQr^timf apgkeo 


fabulously and hieroglyphically, was now 
spoken plainly, the doctrine, namely, o! 
the indwelling of the Creator in man. 
The spiritualist wishes this only, that the 
spiritual principle should be suffered to 
demonstrate itself to the end, in all possi- 
ble applications to the state of man, with- 
out the admission of anything unspiritual, 
that is, anything positive, dogmatic, or 
personal. The excellence of this class 
consists in this, that they have felieved ; 
that, affirming the need of new and higher 
modes of living and action, they have ab- 
stained from the recommendation of low 
methods. Their fault is that they have 
stopped at the intellectual perception ; 
that their will is not yet inspired from the 
Fountain of Love. But whose fault is 
this ? and what a fault, and to what inquiry 
does it lead 1 We have come to that 
which is the spring of all power, of beauty 
and virtue, of art and poetry; and who 
shall tell us according to what law its 
inspirations and its informations are given 
or withholden ? 

I do not wish to be guilty of the narrow- 
ness and pedantry of inferring the tendency 
and genius of the Age from a few and 
insufficient facts or persons. Every age 
has a thousand sides and signs and tend- 
encies ; and it is only when surveyed from 
inferior points of view, that great varieties 
of character appear. Our time too is 
full of activity and performance. Is there 
not something comprehensive in the grasp 
of a society which to great mechanical 
invention, and the best institutions of 
property, adds the most daring theories ; 
which explores the subtlest and most 
universal problems ? At the manifest risk 
of repeating what every other Age has 
thought of itself, we might say, we think 
the Genius of this Age more philosophical 
than any other has been, righter in iU 
aims, truer, with less fear, less fable, lesi 
mixture of any sort. 

But turn it how wo will, as we ponder 
this meaning of the times, every new 
thought drives us to the deep fact, that 
the Time is the child of the Eternity. 
The main interest which any aspects of 
the Tim s can have for us, is tlie great 
spirit which gazes through them, the light 
which they can shed on the wonderful 
questions, What we are ? and Whither we 
tend ? We do not wish to be deceived. 
Here we drift, like white sail across the 
wild ocean, now bright on the wave, now 
darkling in the trough of the sea ; but 
from what port did we sail ? Who knows ? 
Qr tQ port furo wo bouud ? Who 



lecture on the times. 379 


litQOws ? 'There ig no one to tell U3 but 
such poor weather-tossed mariners as our- 
selves, whom we speak as we pass, or who 
have hoisted some signal, or floated to us 
some letter in a bottle from far. But 
what know they more than we ? They 
also found themselves on this wondrous 
sea. No ; from the older sailors, nothing. 
Over all their speaking-trumpets, the gray 
sea and the loud winds answer, Not in us ; 
not in Time. Where then but in Our- 
selves, where but in that Thought through 
which we communicate with absolute na- 
ture, and are made aware that whilst we 
shed the dust of which we are built, grain 
by grain, till it is all gone, the law which 
clothes us with humanity remains new? 
where, but in the intuitions which are 
vouchsafed us from within, shall we learn 
the Truth ? Faithless, faithless, we fancy 
that with the dust we depart and are not ; 
and do not know that the law and the per- 
ception of the law are at last one ; that 
only as much as the law enters us, be- 
comes us, we are living men — immortal 
with the immortality of this law. Under- 
neath all these appearances, lies that 
which is, that which lives, that which 
causes. This ever renewing generation 
of appearances rests on a reality, and a 
reality that is alive. 

To a true scholar the attraction of the 
aspects of nature, the departments of life, 
and the passages of his experience, is 
simply the information they yield him of 
this supreme nature which lurks within 
all. That reality, that causing force is 
moral. The Moral Sentiment is but its 
other name. It makes by its presence or 
absence right and wrong, beauty and ugli- 
ness, genius or deprivation. As the granite 
comes to the surface, and towers into the 
highest mountains, and, if we dig down, 
we find it below the superficial strata, so 
in all the details of our domestic or civil 
life is hidden the elemental reality, which 
ever and anon comes to the surface, and 
forms the grand men, who are the leaders 
and exam^^s, rather than the companions 
of the race. The granite is curiously con- 
cealed under a thousand formations and 
^rfaooa, under fertile soils, and grasses, 


and flowers, under well-manured, arable 
fields, and large towns and cities, but it 
makes the foundation of these, and is 
always indicating its presence by slight 
but sure signs. So is it with the Life of 
our life ; so dose does that also hide, I 
read it in glad and in weeping eyes ; I 
read it in the pride and in the humility of 
people ; it is recognized in every bargain 
and in every complaisance, in every criti- 
cism, and in all praise ; it is voted for at 
elections ; it wins the cause with juries ; 
it rides the stormy eloquence of the senate, 
solo victor ; histories are written of it, 
holidays decreed to it; statues, tombs, 
churches, built to its honour ; yet men 
seem to fear and to shun it, when it comes 
barely to view in our immediate neigh- 
bourhood. 

For that reality let us stand ; that let us 
serve, and for that speak. Only as far as 
that shines through them, are these times 
or any times worth consideration. I wish 
to speak of the politics, education, busi- 
ness, and religion around us, without cere- 
mony or false deference. You will absolve 
me from the charge of flippancy, or malig- 
nity, or the desire to say smart things, at 
the expense of whomsoever, when you see 
that reality is all we prize, and that we are 
bound on our entrance into nature to speak 
for that. Let it not be recorded in our 
own memories, that in this moment of the 
Eternity, when we who were named by our 
names, flitted across the light, we were 
afraid of any fact, or disgraced the fair 
Day by a pusillanimous preference of our 
bread to our freedom. \V--‘at is the scholar, 
what is the man for but for hospitality to 
every new thought of his time ? Have you 
leisure, power property, friends ? you 
shall be the asylum and patron of every 
new thought, every unproven opinion, 
every untried project, which proceeds out 
of good-will and honest seeking. All the 
newspapers, all the tongues of to-day will 
of course -at first defame what is noble; 
but you who hold not of to-day, not of tlie 
times, but of the Everlasting, are to stand 
for it; and the highest compliment man 
ever receives from Heaven, is the sending 
to him iU disguised and discredited angelSi 



MISCELLANIES. 


S«Q 


THE CONSERVATIVE. 

A Lecture Delivered at the Masonic Temple, Boston, 
December 9, 1841. 


The two parties which divide the state, 
the party of Conservatism and that of In- 
novation, are very old, and have disputed 
the possession of the world ever since it 
was made. This quarrel is the subject of 
civil history. The conservative party 
established the reverend hierarchies and 
monarchies of the most ancient world. 
The battle of patrician and plebian, of 
parent state and colony, of old usage and 
accommodation to new facts, of the rich 
and the poor, reappears in all countries 
and times. The war rages not only in 
battle-fields, in national councils, and 
ecclesiastical synods, but agitates every 
man’s bosom with opposing advantages 
every hour. On rolls the old world mean- 
time, and now one, now the other gets the 
day, and still the fight renews itself as if I 
for the first time, under new names and 
hot personalities. 

Such an irreconcilable antagonism, of 
course, must have a correspondent depth 
of seat in the human constitution. It is 
the opposition of Past and Future, of 
Memory and Hope, of the Understanding 
and the Reason. It is the primal antago- 
nism, the appearance in trifles of the two 
poles of nature. 

There is a fragment of old fable which 
seems somehow to have been dropped 
from the current mythologies, which may 
deserve attention, as it appears to relate 
to this subject. 

Saturn grew weary of sitting alone, or 
with none but the great Uranus or Heaven 
beholding him, and he created an oyster. 
Then he would act again, but he made 
nothing more, but went on creating the 
race of oysters. Then Uranus cried, * A 
new work, O Saturn ! the old is not good 
again.' 

Saturn replied. ' 1 fear. There is not only 
the alternative of making and not making, 
but also of unmaking. Seest thou the 
great sea, how it ebbs and flows ? so is it 
with me ; my power ebbs ; and if 1 put 
forth my hands, I shall not do, but undo. 
Therefore I do what I have done ; I hold 
what 1 have got; and so I resist Night 
and Chaos.' 

‘ O Saturn,’ replied Uranus, * thou canst 
oot hold thine own, but by making more. 


Thy oysters are barnacles and cockles 
and with the next flowing of the tide they 
will be pebbles and sea-foam.' 

* I see,' rejoined Saturn, * thou art in 
league with Night, thou art become an evil 
eye ; thou spakest from lova; now thy words 
smite me with hatred. I appeal to Fate, 
must there not be rest ? ' I appeal to 

Fate also,’ said Uranus, ‘ must there not 
be motion ? ’ — But Saturn was silent, and 
went on making oysters for a thousand 
years. 

After that, the word of Uranus came 
into his mind like a ray of the sun, and he 
made Jupiter ; and then he feared again : 
and nature froze, the things that were 
made went backward, and, to save the 
world, Jupiter slew his. father Saturn. 

This may stand for the earliest account 
of a conversation on politics between a 
Conservative and a Radical, which has 
come down to us. It is ever us. It is the 
counteraction of the centripetal and the 
centrifugal forces. Innovation is the salient 
energy; Conservatism the pause on the 
last movement. * That which is was made 
by God,’ saith Conservatism. ‘ He 13 
leaving that, he is entering this other,’ 
rejoins Innovation. 

There is always a certain meanness in 
the argument of conservatism, joined with 
a certain superiority in its fact. It affirms 
because it holds. Its fingers clutch the 
fact, and it will not open its eyes to see a 
better fact. The castle, which conserva- 
I tism is set to defend, is the actual state of 
things, good and bad. The project of 
innovation is the best possible state of 
things. Of course, conservatism always 
has the worst of the argument, is always 
apologizing, pleading a necessity, pleading 
that to change would be to deteriorate ; it 
must saddle itself with the mountainous 
load of the violence and vice of society, 
must deny the possibility of good, deny 
ideas, and suspect and stone the prophet; 
whilst innovation is always in the right, 
triumphant, attacking, and sure of final suc- 
cess. Conservatism stands on man’s con- 
fessed limitations ; reform on his indisputa- 
ble infinitude ; conservatism on circum- 
stance ; liberalism on power ; one goes to 
make an adroit member of the social frames 



THE CONSERVATIVE. 


the other to postpone all things to the man 
himself; conservatism is debonnair and 
social ; reform is individual and imperious. 
We are reformers in spring and\summer ; in 
autumn and winter we stand by the old ; 
reformers in the morning, conservers at 
night. Reform is aflarmative, conservatism 
negative ; conservatism goes for comfort, 
reform for truth. Conservatism is more 
candid to behold another’s worth ; reform 
more disposed to maintain and increase 
its own. Conservatism makes no poetry, 
breathes no prayer, has no invention ; it 
is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, 
no prudence, no husbandry. It makes a 
great difference to your figure and to your 
thought, whether your foot is advancing or 
receding. Conservatism never puts the 
foot forward ; in the hour when it does 
that, it is not establishment, but reform. 
Conservatism tends to universal seeming 
and treachery, believes in a negative fate ; 
believes that men’s temper governs them ; 
that for me, it avails not to trust in prin- 
ciples ; they will fail me ; I must bend a 
little ; it distrusts nature ; it thinks there 
is A general law without a particular 
application — law for all that does not in- 
clude anyone. Reform in its antagonism 
tnclines to asinine resistance, to kick with 
hoofs ; it runs to egotism and bloated 
self-conceit ; it runs to a bodiless preten- 
sion, to unnatural refining and elevation, 
wihich ends in hypocrisy and sensual 
reaction. 

And so whilst wo do not go beyond 
general statements, it may be safely 
affirmed of these two metaphysical anta- 
gonists, that each is a good half, but an 
impossible whole. Each exposes the 
abuses of the other, but in a true society, 
in a true man, both must combine. Nature 
does not give the crown of its approba- 
tion, namely, beauty, to any action or 
emblem or actor, but to one which com- 
bines both these elements; not to the 
rock which resists the waves from age to 
age, nor to the wave which lashes inces- 
santly the rock, but the superior beauty is 
with the oak which stands with its hundred 
arms against the storms of a century, and 
grows every year like a sapling ; or the 
river which ever flowing, yet is found in 
the same bed from age to age ; or, greatest 
of all, the man who has subsisted for years 
amid the changes of nature, yet has dis- 
tanced himself, so that when you remem- 
ber what he was, and see what he is, you 
•ay, what strides! what a disparity is 
here! 

Throughout nature the past combines 


in every creature with the present. Each 
of the convolutions of the sea-shell, each 
node and spine marks one year of the 
fish’s life, what was the mouth of the 
shell for one season, with the addition of 
new matter by the growth of the animal, 
becoming an ornamental node. The 
leaves and a shell of soft wood are all 
that the vegetation of this summer has 
made, but the solid ^lumnar stem which 
lifts that bank of foliage into the air to 
draw the eye and to cool us with its shade, 

I is the gift and legacy of dead and buried 
years. 

In nature, eac^ of these elements being 
always present, each theory has a natural 
support. As we take our stand on Neces- 
sity, or on Ethics, shall we go for the con- 
servative, or for the reformer. If we read 
the word historically, we shall say, Of all 
the ages, the present hour and circum- 
stance is the cumulative result; this is 
the best throw of the dice of nature that 
has yet been, or that is yet possible. If 
we see it from the side of Will, or the 
Moral Sentiment, we shall accuse the Past 
and the Present, and require the impos- 
sible of the Future. 

But although this bifold fact lies thus 
united in re^ nature, and so united that 
no man can continue to exist in whom both 
these elements do not work, yet men are 
not philosophers, but are rather very fool- 
ish children, who, by reason of their par- 
tiality, see everything in the most absurd 
manner, and are the victims at all times 
of the nearest object. There is even no 
philosopher who is a philosopher at all 
times. Our experience, our perception is 
conditioned by the need to acquire in 
parts and in succession, that is, with every 
truth a certain falsehood. As this is the 
invarible method of our training, we must 
give it allowance, and suffer men to learn 
as they have done for six millenniums, a 
word at a time, to pair off into insane 
parties, and learn the amount of truth 
each knows, by the denial of an equal 
amount of truth. For the present, then, 
to come at what sum is attainable to us, 
we must even hear the parties plead as 
parties. 

That which is best about conservatism, 
that which, though it cannot be expressed 
in detail, inspires reverence in all, is the 
Inevitable. There is the question not 
only, what the conservative says for him- 
self? but, why must he say it? What 
insurmountable fact binds him to that 
side? Here is the fact which men call 
Fate, and fate in dread degrees, fate bih 



S8i UlSCBLLAmBS. 

hind fatd, not to be disposed of by the necessity and divinity which in In thenii 
consideration that the Conscience com- The respect for the old names of places, 
mands this or that, but necessitating the of mountains and streams is universal, 
question, whether the faculties of man The Indian and barbarous name can 
will play him true in resisting the facts of never be supplanted without loss. The 
universal experience ? For although the ancients tell us that the gods loved the 
commands of the Conscience are essen- Ethiopians for their stable customs ; and 
tially absolute, they are historically the Egyptians and Chaldeans, whose 
limitary. Wisdom does not seek a literal origin could not be explored, passed 
rectitude, but an useful, that is, a condi- among the junior tribes of Greece and 
tioned one, such a one as the faculties of Italy for sacred nations, 
man and the constitution of things will Moreover, so deep is the foundation of 
warrant. The reformer, the partisan, the existing social system, that it leaves 
loses himself in driving to the utmost no one out of it. We may be partial, but 
some specialty of right conduct, until his Fate is not. All men have their root in 
own nature and all nature resist him ; it. You who quarrel with the arrange- 
but Wisdom attempts nothing enormous ments of society, and are willing to em- 
and disproportioned to its powers, nothing broil all, and risk the indisputable good 
which it cannot perform or nearly per- that exists, for the chance of better, live, 
form. We have all a certain intellection move and have your being in this, and 
or presentiment of reform existing in the your deeds contradict your words every 
mind, which does not yet descend into day. For as you cannot jump from the 
the character, and those who throw them- ground without using the resistance of the 
selves blindly on this lose themselves, ground, nor put out the boat to sea, with- 
Whatever they attempt in that direction, out shoving from the shore, nor attain 
fails and reacts suicidally on the actor liberty without rejecting obligation, so you 
himself. This is the penalty of having are under the necessity of using the Actual 
transcended nature. For the existing order of things, in order to disuse it; to 
world is not a dream, and cannot with im- live by it whilst you wish to take away its 
punity be treated as a dream ; neither is life. The past has baked your loaf, an(> 
It a disease ; but it is the ground on in the strength of its bread you would 
which you stand, it is the mother of whom break up the oven. But you are betrayed 
you were born. Reform converses with by your own nature. You also are con* 
possibilities, perchance with impossibili- servatives. However men please to style 
ties ; but here is sacred fact. This also themselves, I see no other than a conscr- 
was true, or it could not be : it had life in vative party. You are not only identical 
it, or it could not have existed ; it has with us in your needs, but also in your 
life in it, or it could not continue. Your methods and aims. You quarrel with my 
schemes may be feasible or may not be, conservatism, but it is to build up one of 
but this has the indorsement of nature your own ; it will have a new beginning, 
and a long friendship and cohabitation but the same course and end, the same 
with the powers of nature. This will trials, the same passions ; among the 
stand until a better cast of the dice is lovers of the new I observe that there is a 
made. The contest between the Future jealousy of the newest, and that the 
and the Past is one between Divinity seceder from the seceder is as damnable 
entering, and Divinity departing, You as the pope himself, 
are welcome to try your experiments, and, On these and the like grounds of general 
if you can, to displace the actual order by statement, conservatism plants itself with- 
that ideal republic you announce, for no- out danger of being displaced. Especially 
thing but God will expel God, But before this appeal, the innovator 
plainly the burden of proof must lie with must confess his weakness, must confess 
the projector. We hold to this until you that no man is to be found good enough 
can demonstrate something better. to be entitled to stand champion for the 

The system of property and law goes principle. But when this great tendency 
back for its origin to barbarous and sacred comes to practical encounters, and is 
times ; it is the fruit of the same myste- challenged by young men, to whom it is 
rious cause as the mineral or animal no abstraction, but a fact of hunger, 
world. There is a natural sentiment and distress, and exclusion from opportuni- 
prepossession in favour of age, of ances- ties, it must needs seem injurious. The 
tors, of barbarous and aboriginal usages, youth, of course, is an innovator by the 
which is a homage to the element of fact of his birth. There he stands, newly 



THS CONSBnVATlVB. 


born on the planet, a universal beggar, 
with all the reason of things, one would 
say, on his side. In his first considera- 
tion how to feed, clothe, and warm him- 
self, he is met by warnings on every hand, 
that this thing and that thing have owners, 
and he must go elsewhere. Then he 
says : “ If I am born into the earth, where 
is my part ? have the goodness, gentlemen 
of this world, to show me my wood-lot, 
where I may fell my wood, my field 
where to plant my corn, my pleasant 
ground where to build my cabin.’* 

“ Touch any wood, or field, or house- 
lot, on your peril,” cry all the gentlemen 
of this world ; ” but you may come and 
work in ours, for us, and we will give you 
a piece of bread.” 

And what is that peril? 

Knives and muskets, if we meet you in 
the act : imprisonment, if we find you 
afterward. 

And by what authority, kind gentle- 
men ? 

By our law. 

And your law—is it just ? 

As just for you as it was for us. We 
wrought for others under this law, and 
got our lands so. 

I repeat the question, Is your law just ? 

Not quite just, but necessary. More- 
over, it is juster now than it was when we 
were born ; wo have made it milder and 
more equal. 

I will none of your law, returns the 
youth ; it encumbers mo. I cannot under- 
&tand, or so much as spare time to read 
that needless library of your laws. Nature 
has sufficiently provided me with rewards 
find sharp penalties, to bind me not to 
transgress. Like the Persian noble of 
old, I ask “ that I may neither command 
nor obey.” I do not wish to enter into 
your complex social system. I shall serve 
those whom I can, and they who can will 
serve me. 1 shall seek those whom I 
love, and shun those whom I love not, 
and what more can all your laws render;me'? 

With equal earnestness and good faith, 
replies to this plaintiff an upholder of the 
establishment, a man of many virtues: — 
Your opposition is feather-brained and 
over-fine. Young man, I have no skill 
to talk with you, but look at me ; I have 
risen early and sat late, and toiled 
honestly, and painfully for very many 
years. I never dreamed about methods ; 
1 laid my bones to, and drudged for the 
good I possess ; it was not got by fraud, 
nor by luck, but by work, and you must 
•how me a warrant like these stubborn 


381 

facts in your own fidelity and labour, 
before I suffer you, on the faith of a few 
fine words, to ride into my estate, and 
claim to scatter it as your own. 

Now you touch the heart of the matter, 
replies the reformer, To that fidelity and 
labour, I pay homage. I am unworthy to 
arraign your manner of living, until I too 
have been tried. But I should be more 
unworthy, if I did not tell you why I 
cannot walk in your steps. I find this 
vast network, which you call property, 
extended over the whole planet. I can- 
not occupy the bleakest crag of the White 
Hills or the Alleghany Range, but soma 
man or corporation steps up to me to 
show me that it is his. Now, though I 
am very peaceable, and on my private 
account could well enough die, since it 
appears there was some mistake in my 
creation, and that I have been mfssent to 
this earth, where all the seats were al- 
ready taken — yet I feel called upon in 
behalf of rational nature, which I repre- 
sent, to declare to you my opinion, that, 
if the Earth is yours, so also is it mine. 
All your aggregate existences are less to 
me a fact than is my own ; as I am born 
to the earth, so the Earth is given to me, 
what I want of it to till and to plant ; nor 
could I, without pusillanimity, omit to 
claim so much, I must not only have a 
name to live, I must live. My genius 
leads me to build a different manner of 
life from any of yours. I cannot then 
spare you the whole world. I love you 
better. I must tell you the truth practi- 
cally ; and take that which you call yours. 
It is God’s world and mine; yours as 
much as you want, mine as much as I 
want. Besides, I know your ways ; I 
know the symptoms of the disease. To 
the end of your power, you will serve 
this lie which cheats you. Your want is 
a gulf which the possession of the broad 
earth would not fill. Yonder sun in 
heaven you would pluck down from 
shining on the universe, and make him a 
property and privacy, if you could ; and 
the moon and the north star you would 
quickly have occasion for in your closet 
and bedchamber. What you do not want 
for use, you crave for ornament, and 
what your convenience could spare, your 
pride cannot. 

On the other hand, precisely the defence 
which was set up for the British Constitu- 
tion, namely, that with all its admitted 
defects, rotten boroughs and monopolies, 
it worked well, and substantial justice 
was somehow done ; the wisdom and the 



$84 MISCELLANIES. 


worth did get into Parliament, and every 
interest did by right, or might, or sleight, 
get represented ; the same defence is set 
up for the existing institutions. They 
are not the best; they are not just ; and 
in respect to you, personally, O brave 
young man ! they cannot be justified. 
They have, it is most true, left yov^ no 
acre for your own, and no law but our 
law, to the ordaining of which, you were 
no party. But they do answer the end, 
they are jreally friendly to the good ; un- 
friendly to the bad ; they second the in- 
dustrious, and the kind ; they foster 
genius. They really have so much flexi- 
bility as to afford your talent and charac- 
ter, on the whole, the same chance of 
demonstration and success which they 
might have, if there was no law and no 
property. 

It is trivial and merely superstitious to 
»ay that nothing is given you, no outfit, 
no exhibition; for in this institution of 
credit, which is as universal as honesty 
and promise in the human countenance, 
always some neighbour stands ready to be 
bread and land and tools and stock to the 
young adventurer. And if in any one 
respect they have come short, see what 
ample retribution of good they have made. 
They have lost no time and spared no 
expense to collect libraries, museums, 
galleries, colleges, palaces, hospitals, ob- 
servatories, cities. The ages have not 
been idle, nor kings slack, nor the rich 
niggardly. Have w'e not atoned for this 
small offence (which we could not help) of 
leaving you no right in the soil, by this 
splendid indemnity of ancestral and na- 
tional wealth ? Would you have been 
born like a gypsy in a hedge, and pre- 
ferred your freedom on a heath, and the 
range of a planet which had no shed or 
boscage to cover you from sun and wind — 
to this towered and citied world ? to this 
world of Rome, and Memphis, and Ck)n- 
stantinople, and Vienna, and Paris, and 
London, and New York? For thee Naples, 
Florence and Venice; ;for thee the fair 
Mediterranean, the sunny Adriatic; for 
thee both Indies smile ; for thee the hos- 
pitable North opens its heated palaces 
under the polar circle; for thee roads 
have been cut in every direction across 
the land, and fleets of floating palaces 
with every security for strength, and pro- 
vision for luxury, swim by sail and by 
steam through all the waters of this 
world. Every island for thee has a town ; 
every town a hotel. Though thou wast 
born landless, yet to thy industry and 


thrift and small condescension to the e9« 
tablished usage— scores of servants are 
swarming in every strange place with cap 
and knee to thy command, scores, nay, 
hundreds and thousands, for thy ward- 
robe, thy table, thy chamber, thy library, 
thy leisure ; and every whim is anticipated 
and served by the best ability of the whole 
population of each country. The king on 
the throne governs for thee, and the judge 
judges; the barrister pleads, the farmer 
tills, the joiner hammers, the postman 
rides. la it not exaggerating a trifle to 
insist on a formal acknowledgment of your 
claims, when these substantial advantages 
have been secured to you? Now can 
your children be educated, your labour 
turned to their advantage, and its fruits 
secured to them after your death. It is 
frivolous to say, you have no acre, be- 
cause you have not a mathematically 
measured piece of land. Providence takes, 
care that you shall have a place, that you 
are waited for, and come accredited ; and 
as soon as you put your gift to use, you 
shall have acre or acre’s worth, accord- 
ing to your exhibition of desert — acre, it 
you need land ; acre’s worth, if you pre* 
fer to draw, or carve, or make shoes, or 
wheel^ to the tilling of the soil. 

^ Besides, it might temper your indigna- 
tion at the supposed wrong which society 
has done you, to keep the question before 
you, how society got into this predica- 
ment ? Who put things on this false 
basis ? No single man, but all men. No 
man voluntarily and knowingly ; but it is 
the result of that degree of culture there 
is in the planet. The order of things is 
as good as the character of the population 
permits. Consider it as the work of a 
great and beneficent and progressive ne- 
cessity, which, from the first pulsation to 
the first animal life, up to the present 
high culture of the best nations, has ad- 
vanced thus far. Thank the rude foster* 
mother though she has taught you a better 
wisdom than her own, and has set hopes 
in your heart which shall be history in the 
next ages. You are yourself the result of 
this manner of living, this foul compro- 
mise, this vituperated Sodom. It nourished 
you with care and love on its breast as it 
had nourished many a lover of the right, 
and many a poet, and prophet, and teacher 
of men. Is it so irremediably bad^ Then 
again, if the mitigations are considered, 
do not all the mischiefs virtually vanish ? 
The form is bad, but see you not how 
every personal character reacts on the 
form, and makes it new ? A strong person 



THE CONSERVATIVE, 


makea the law and custom null before his 
own will. Then the principle of love and 
truth reappears in the strictest courts of 
fashion and property. Under the richest : 
robes, in the darlings of the Belectest| 
circles of European or American aristoc- 
racy, the strong heart will beat with love 
of mankind, with impatience of accidental 
distinctions, with the desire to achieve 
its own fate, and make every ornament it 
wears authentic and real. 

Moreover, as we have already shown 
that there is no pure reformer, so it is to 
be considered that there is no pure con- 
servative, no man who from the beginning 
to the end of his life maintains the defective 
institutions ; but he who sets his face like 
a flint against every novelty, when ap- 
proached in the confidence of conserva- 
tion, in the presence of friendly and gene- 
rous persons, has also his gracious and 
relenting motions, and espouses for the 
time the cause of man ; and even if this 
be a short-lived emotion, yet the remem- 
brance of it in private hours mitigates his 
Belfishness and compliance with custom. 

The Friar Bernard lamented in his cell 
on Mount Cenis the crimes of mankind, 
and rising one morning before day from 
his bed of moss and dry leaves, he gnawed 
his roots and berries, drank of the spring, 
and set forth to go to Rome to reform the 
corruption of mankind. On his way he 
encountered many travellers who greeted 
him courteously; and the cabins of the 
peasants and the castles of the lords sup- 
plied his few wants. When he came at 
last to Rome, his piety and goodwill easily 
introduced him to many families of the 
rich, and on the first day he saw and 
talked with gentle mothers with their 
babes at their breasts, who told him how 
much love they bore their children, and 
how they were perplexed in their daily 
walk lest they should fail in their duty 
to them. * What! ' he said, ‘ and this on 
rich embroidered carpets, on marble 
floors, with cunning sculpture, and carved 
wood, and rich pictures, and piles of books 
about you ? ' — ‘ Look at our pictures and 
books,’ they said, * and we will tell you, 
good Father, how we spent the last even- 
ing. These are stories of godly children 
and holy families and romantic sacrifices 
made in old or in recent times by great 
and not mean persons ; and last evening, 
our family was collected, and our hus- 
bands and brothers discoursed sadly on 
what we could save and give in the hard 
times.' Then came in the men, and they 
•aid, ' What cheer, brother ? Does thy 


3*3 

convent want gifts?' Then the Friar 
Bernard went home swiftly with other 
thoughts than he brought, saying, ‘ This 
way of life is wrong, yet these Romans, 
whom I prayed God to destroy, are lovers, 
they are lovers ; what can I do ? ’ 

The reformer concedes that these miti- 
gations exist, and that, if he proposed 
comfort, he should take sides with the 
establishment. Your words are excellent, 
but they do not tell the whole. Conserva- 
tism is affluent and open-handed, but 
there is a cunning juggle in riches. I ob- 
served that they take somewhat for every- 
thing they give. I look bigger, but am 
less ; I have more clothes, but am not so 
warm; more armour, but less courage; 
more books, but less wit. What you say 
of your planted, builded, and decorated 
world is true enough, and I gladly avail 
myself of its convenience ; yet I have re- 
marked that what holds in particular 
holds in general, that the plant Man does 
not require for his most glorious flowering 
this pomp of preparation and convenience, 
but the thoughts of some beggarly Homer 
who strolled, God knows when, in the in- 
' fancy and barbarism of the old world ! 
the gravity and sense of some slave Moses 
who leads away his fellow-slaves from 
their masters ; the contemplation of soma 
Scythian Anacharsis ; the erect formidable 
valour of some Dorian townsmen in the 
town of Sparta ; the vigour of Clovis the 
Frank, and Alfred the Saxon, and Alaric 
the Goth, and Mahomet, Ali, and Omar 
the Arabians, Saladin the Curd, and Oth- 
man the Turk, sufficed to build what you 
call society, on the spot and in the instant 
when the sound mind in a sound body ap- 
peared, Rich and fine is your dress, O 
conservatism I your horses are of the best 
blood ; your roads are well cut and well 
paved ; your pantry is full of meats and 
your cellar of wines, and a very good state 
and condition are you for gentlemen and 
ladies to live under; but every one of 
these goods steals away a drop of my 
blood. I want the necessity of supplying 
my own wants. All this costly culture of 
yours is not necessary. Greatness does 
not need it. Yonder peasant, who sits neg- 
lected there in a corner, carries a whole 
resolution of man and nature in bis head, 
which shall be a sacred history to some 
future ages. For man is the end of nature ; 
nothing so easily organizes itself in every 
part of the universe as he ; no moss, no 
lichen is so easily bom: and he takes 
along with him and puts out from himself 
the whole apparatus of society and tondi* 



BilSC^LLAi^tBS. 


S86 

tion exiempon, as an army encamps in a 
desert, and where all was just now blowing 
sand, creates a white city in an hour, a 
government, a market, a place for feast- 
ing, for conversation, and for love. 

These considerations, urged by those 
whose characters and whose fortunes are 
yet to be formed, must needs command 
the sympathy of all reasonable persons. 
But besides that charity which should 
make all adult persons interested for the 
youth, and engage them to see that he has 
a free field and fair play on his entrance 
into life, we are bound to see that the 
society, of which we compose a part, does 
not permit the formation or continuance 
of views and practices injurious to the 
honour and welfare of mankind. The ob- 
jection to conservatism, when embodied 
in a party, is, that in its love of acts, it 
hates principles: it lives in the senses, 
not in truth ; it sacrifices to despair ; it 
goes for availableness in its candidate, not 
for worth ; and for expediency in its mea- 
sures, and not for the right. Under pre- 
tence of allowing for friction, it makes so 
many additions and supplements to the 
machine of society, that it will play 
smoothly and softly, but will no longer 
grind any grist. 

The conservative party in the universe 
concedes that the radical would talk suf- 
ficiently to the purpose, if we were still 
in the garden of Eden ; he legislates for 
man as he ought to be ; his theory is 
right, but he makes no allowance for 
friction ; and this emission makes his 
whole doctrine false. The idealist retorts, 
that the conservative falls into a far more 
noxious error in the other extreme. The 
conservative assumes sickness as a neces- 
sity, and his social frame is a hospital, 
his total legislation is for the present dis- 
tress, a universe in slippers and flannels, 
with bib and pap-spoon, swallowing pills 
and herb-tea. Sickness gets organized 
as well as health, the vice as well as the j 
virtue. Now that a vicious system of 
trade has existed so long, it has stereo- 
typed itself in the human generation, and 
misers are born. And now that sickness 
has got such a foothold, leprosy has grown 
cunning, has got into the ballot-box ; the 
lepers outvote the clean ; society has re- 1 
solved itself into a Hospital Committee, 
and all its laws are quarantine. If any 
man resist, and set up a foolish hope he 
has entertained as good against the 
general despair, society frowns on him, 
shuts him out of her opportunities, her 
granaries, her refectories, her water and 


bread, and will serve hlfft a sextoii’fi turtSh 
Conservatism takes as low a view of every 
part of human action and passion. Its 
religion is just as bad ; a lozenge for the 
sick ; a dolorous tune to beguile the dis- 
temper ; mitigations of pain by pillows 
and anodynes ; always mitigations, never 
remedies ; pardons for sin, funeral hon- 
ours — never self-help, renovation, and 
virtue. Its social and political action 
has no better aim ; to keep out wind and 
weather, to bring the day and year about, 
and make the world last our day ; not to 
sit on the world and steer it ; not to sink 
the memory of the past in the glory of a 
new and more excellent creation ; a timid 
cobbler and patcher, it degrades what' 
ever it touches. The cause of education 
is urged in this country with the utmost 
earnestness — on what ground ? why on 
this, that the people have the power, and 
if they are not instructed to sympathize 
I with the intelligent, reading, trading, and 
I governing class, inspired with a taste for 
the same competitions and prizes, they 
will upset the fair pageant of Judicature, 
and perhaps lay a hand on the sacred 
muniments of wealth itself, and new dis- 
tribute the land. Religion is taught in 
the same spirit. The contractors who 
were building a road ')\it of Baltimore, 
some years ago, found the Irish labourers 
quarrelsome and refractory, to a degree 
that embarrassed the agents, and seriously 
interrupted the progress of the work. 
The corporation were advised to call off 
the police, and build a Catholic chapel, 
which they did ; the priest presently re- 
stored order, and the work went on pros- 
perously. Such hints, be sure, are too 
valuable to be lost. If you do not value 
the Sabbath, or other religious institu- 
tions, give yourself no concern about 
maintaining them. They have already 
acquired a market value as conservators 
of property: and if priest and church- 
member should fail, the chambers of 
commerce and the presidents of the banks, 
the very innholders and landlords of the 
county would muster with fury to their 
support. 

Of course, religion in such hands loses 
its eiiLcnce. Instead of that reliance, 
which the soul suggests on the eternity of 
truth and duty, men are misled into a re- 
liance on institutions, which, the moment 
they cease to be the instantaneous crea- 
tions of the devout sentiment, are worth- 
less, Religion among the low becomes 
low. As it loses its truth, it loses credit 
with the sagacious. They detect tbo 



THE CONSERVATIVE. 




ftilscliood of the preaching, but when they 
say so, all good citizens cry, Hush ; do 
not weaken the state, do not take off the 
strait-jacket from dangerous persons. 
Every honest fellow must keep up the 
hoax the best he can ; must patronize 
providence and piety, and wherever he 
sees anything that will keep men amused, 
schools or churches or poetry, or picture- 
galleries or music, or what not, he must 
cry, Hist-a-boy,” and urge the game on. 
What a compliment we pay to the good 
Spirit with our superserviceable zeal 1 
But not to balance reasons for and 
against the establishment any longer, 
and if it still be asked in this necessity of 
partial organization, which party on the 
whole has the highest claims on our 
sympathy ? I bring it home to the private 
heart, where all such questions must have 
their final arbitrament. How will every 
strong and generous mind choose its 
ground — with the defenders of the old ? 
or with the seekers of the new ? Which 
is that state which promises to edify a 
great, brave, and beneficent man ; to 
throw him on his resources, and tax the 
strength of his character ? On which part 
will each of us find himself in the hour of 
health and of aspiration ? 

1 understand well the respect of man- 
kind for war, because that breaks up the 
Chinese stagnation of society, and demon- 
strates the personal merits of all men. 
A state of war or anarchy, in which law 
has little force, is so far valuable, that it 
puts every man on trial. The man of 
principle is known as such, and even in 
tlie fury of faction is respected. In the 
civil wars of France, Montaigne alone, 
among all the French gentry, kept his 
castle gates unbarred, and made his per- 
sonal integrity as good at least as a regi- 
ment. The man of courage and resources 
is shown, and the effeminate and base 
person. Those who rise above war, and 
those who fall below it, it easily discrimi- 
nates, as well as those who, accepting its 
rude conditions, keep their own head by : 
their own sword, I 

But in peace and a commercial state we 
depend, not as we ought, on our know- 
ledge and all men’s knowledge that we 
are honest men, but we cowardly lean on 
the virtue of others. For it is always the 
virtue of some men in the society, which 
keeps the law in any reverence and power. 
Is there not something shameful that 1 
should owe my peaceful occupancy of 
my house and field, not to the knowledge 
Of my couatrym^Q that 1 am useful, but 


387 

to their respect for sundry other reputa- 
ble persons, I know not whom, whose 
joint virtues still keep the law in good 
odour ? 

It will never make any difference to a 
hero what the laws are. His greatness 
will shine and accomplish itself unto the 
end, whether they second him or not. If ha 
have earned his bread by drudgery, and 
in the narrow and crooked ways which 
were all an evil law had left him, he will 
make it at least honourable by his expen- 
diture. Of the past he will take no heed ; 
for its wrongs he will not hold himself 
responsible ; he will say, all the meanness 
of my progenitors shall not bereave me of 
the power to make this hour and company 
fair and fortunate. Whatsoever streams 
of power and commodity flow to me, shall 
of me acquire healing virtue, and become 
fountains of safety. Cannot I too descend 
a Redeemer into nature ? Whosoever 
hereafter shall name my name, shall not 
record a malefactor, but a benefactor in 
the earth. If there be power in good in- 
tention, in fidelity, and in toil, the north 
wind shall be purer, the stars in heaven 
shall glow with a kindlier beam, that I 
have lived. I am primarily engaged to 
myself to be a public servant of ail the 
gods, to demonstrate to all men that there 
is intelligence and good-will at the heart 
of things, and ever higher and yet higher 
leadings. These are my engagements ; 
how can your law further or hinder me in 
what I shall do to men ? On the other 
hand, these dispositions establish their 
relations to me. Wherever there is worth 
I shall be greeted. Wherever there are 
men, are the objects of my study and 
love. Sooner or later all men will bo 
my friends, and will testify in all 
methods the energy of their regard. I 
cannot thank your law for my protection. 
1 protect it. It is not in its power to 
protect me. It is my business to make 
myself revered. I depend on my honour, 
my labour, and my dispositions, for my 
place in the affections of mankind, and 
not on any conventions or parchments of 
yours. 

But if I allow myself in derelictions, 
and become idle and dissolute, I quickly 
come to love the protection of a strong 
law, because I feel no title in myself to 
my advantages. To the intemperate and 
covetous person no love flows; to him 
mankind would pay no rent, no dividend, 
if force were once relaxed ; nay, if they 
could give their verdict, they would say, 
that his self-ioc^ulgence and his opprei> 



3S8 MISCELLANIES. 


Sion deserved punishment from society, 
and not that rich board and lodging he 
now enjoys. The law acts then as a 
screen of his unworthiness, and makes 
him worse the longer it protects him. 

In conclusion, to return from this alter- 
nation of partial views, to the high plat- 
form of universal and necessary history, 
it is a happiness for mankind that innova- 
tion has got on so far, and has so free a 
field before it. The boldness of the hope 
men entertain transcends all former ex- 


perience. It calms and cheers them with 
the picture of a simple and equal life of 
truth and piety. And this hope flowered 
on what tree ? It was not imported from 
the stock of some celestial plant, but 
grew here on the wild crab of conserva- 
tism. It is much that this old and vitu- 
perated system of things has borne so 
fair a child. It predicts that, amidst a 
planet peopled with conservatives, one 
Reformer may yet be born. 


THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 

A Lecture Read at the Masonic Temple, Boston, January, 1841*. 


The first thing we have to say respecting 
what are called new views here in New 
England, at the present time, is that they 
are not new, but the very oldest of 
thoughts cast into the mould of these new 
times. The light is always identical in 
its composition, but it falls on a great 
variety of objects, and by so falling is first 
revealed to us, not in its own form, for it 
is formless, but in theirs ; in like manner, 
thought only appears in the objects it 
classifies. What is popularly called 
Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; 
Idealism as it appears in 1842. As 
thinkers, mankind have ever divided into 
two sects, Materialists and Idealists ; the 
first class founded on experience, the 
second on consciousness ; the first class 
beginning to think from the data of the 
senses, the second class perceive that 
the senses are not final, and say the 
senses give us representations of things, 
but what are the things themselves, they 
cannot tell. The materialist insists on 
facts, on history, on the force of circum- 
stances, and the animal wants of man : 
the idealist, on the power of Thought and 
of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on in- 
dividual culture. These two modes of 
thinking are both natural, but the idealist 
contends that his way of thinking is in 
higher nature. He concedes all that the 
other affirms, admits the impressions of 
sense, admits their coherency, their use 
and beauty, and then asks the materialist 
for his grounds of assurance that things 
are as his senses represent them. But I, 
he says, affirm facts not affected by the 
illusions of sense, facts which are of the 
same nature as the faculty which reports 
them, and not liable to doubt ; facts which 
la their first appearance to us assume a 


native superiority to material facts, de 
grading these into a language by which 
the first are to be spoken ; facts which it 
only needs a retirement from the senses 
to discern. Every materialist will be an 
idealist ; but an idealist can never go back- 
ward to be a materialist. 

The idealist, in speaking of events, sees 
them as spirits. He does not deny the 
sensuous fact : by no means; but he will 
not see that alone, He does not deny the 
presence of this table, this chair, and tb a 
walls of this room, but he looks at these 
things as the reverse side of the tapestry, 
as the other end, each being a sequel or 
completion of a spiritual fact which merely 
concerns him. This manner of looking nt 
things transfers every object in nature 
from an independent and anomalous posi 
tion without there, into the consciousness. 
Even the materialist Condillac, perhaps 
the most logical expounder of materialism, 
was constrained to say : “ Though we 
should soar into the heavens, though wo 
should sink into the abyss, we never go out 
of ourselves; it is always our own thought 
that we perceive.” What more could an 
idealist say ? 

The materialist, secure in the certainty 
of sensation, mocks at fine-spun theories, 
at star-gazers and dreamers, and believes 
that his life is solid, that he at least takes 
nothing for granted, but knows where ho 
stands, and what he does. Yet how easy 
it is to show him that he also is a phantom 
walking and working amid phantoms, and 
that he need only ask a question or two 
beyond his daily questions, to find his 
solid universe growing dim and impalp- 
able before his sense. The sturdy cap- 
italist, no matter how deep and square on 
blocks of Quincy granVte be lays tbo 



THE TEANSCENDBNTALIST. 


foundations of his banking-house or Ex- 
change, must set it, at last, not on a cube 
corresponding to the angles of his struc- 
ture, but on a mass of unknown materials 
and solidity, red-hot or white-hot, perhaps 
at the core, which rounds off to an almost 
perfect sphericity, and lies floating in soft 
air, and goes spinning away, dragging 
bank and banker with it at a rate of thou- 
sands of miles the hour, he knows not 
whither — a bit of bullet, now glimmer- 
ing, now darkling through a small cubic 
space on the edge of an unimaginable pit 
of emptiness. And this wild balloon, in 
which his whole venture is embarked, is a 
just symbol of his whole state and faculty. 
One thing, at least, he says is certain, and 
does not give me the headache, that 
figures do not lie: the multiplication- 
table has been hitherto found unimpeach- 
able truth ; and, moreover, if I put a gold 
eagle in my safe, I find it again to-morrow ; 
but for these thoughts, I know not whence 
they are. They change and pass away. 
But ask him why he believes that an 
uniform experience will continue uni- 
form, or on what grounds he founds his 
faith in his figures, and he will perceive 
that his mental fabric is built up on just 
as strange and quaking foundations as his 
proud edifice of stone. 

In the order of thought, the materialist 
takes his departure from the external 
world, and esteems a man as one product 
of that. The idealist takes his departure 
from his consciousness, and reckons the 
world an appearance. The materialist 
respects sensible masses, Society, Govern- 
ment, social art, and luxury, every estab- 
lishment, every mass, whether majority 
of numbers, or extent of space, or amount 
of objects, every social action. The 
idealist has another measure, which is 
metaphysical, namely, the rank which 
things themselves take in his conscious- 
ness ; not at all, the size or appearance. 
Mind is the only reality, of which men 
and all other natures are better or worse 
reflectors. Nature, literature, history, are 
only subjective phenomena. Although in 
his action overpowered by the laws of 
action, and so, warmly co-operating with 
men, even preferring them to himself, 
yet when he speaks scientifically, or after 
the order of thought, he is constrained to 
degrade persons into representatives of 
truths. He does not respect labour, or 
the products of labour, namely, property, 
otherwise than as a manifold symbol, 
illustrating with wonderful fidelity of 
details the laws of being; he does not 


respect government, except as fajt as it 
reiterates the law of his mind ; nor the 
church, nor charities ; nor arts, for them- 
selves ; but hears, as at a vast distance, 
what they say, as if his consciousness 
would speak to him through a pantomimic 
scene. His thought — that is the Universe. 
His experience inclines him to behold 
the procession of facts yo*l call the world, 
as flowing perpetually outward from an 
invisible, unsounded centre in himself, 
centre alike of him and of them, and 
necessitating him to regard all things as 
having a subjective or relative existence, 
relative to that aforesaid Unknown Centre 
of him. 

From this transfer of the world into the 
consciousness, this beholding of all things 
in the mind, follow easily his whole 
ethics. It is simpler to be self-dependent. 
The height, the deity of man is, to be 
self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign 
force. Society is good when it does not 
violate me ; but best when it is likest to 
solitude. Everything real is self-existent. 
Everything divine shares the self-existence 
of Deity. AH that you call the world is 
the shadow of that substance which you 
are, the perpetual creation of the powers 
of thought, of those that are dependent 
and of those that are independent of your 
will, Do not cumber your.self witli fruit- 
less pains to mend and remedy remote 
effects; let the soul be erect, and all 
things will go well. You think me tho 
child of my circumstances : I make my 
circumstance. Let any thought or motive 
of mine be different from that they are, 
the difference will transform my condition 
and economy. I — this thought which is 
called I — is the mould into which the 
world is poured like melted wax. The 
mould is invisible, but the world betrays 
the shape of the mould. You call it the 
power of circumstance, but it is the power 
of me. Am I in harmony with myself? 
my position will seem to you just and 
commanding. Am I vicious and insane ? 
my fortunes will seem to you obscure and 
descending. As I am, so shall I associate, 
and, so shall I act : Caesar’s history will 
pamt out Caesar. Jesus acted so, because 
he thought so. I do not wish to overlook 
or to gainsay any reality ; I say, I make 
my circumstance : but if you ask me, 
Whence am I ? I feel like other men my 
relation to that Fact which cannot be 
spoken or defined, nor even thought, but 
which exists, and will exist 
The Tran«cendentalist adopts tho whole 
connection of spiritual doctrine. He be 



390 


MISCELLANIES. 


lieves in miracle, in the perpetual open- 
ness of the human mind to new influx of 
light and power : he believes in inspira- 
tion and in ecstasy. He wishes that the 
spiritual principle should be suffered to 
demonstrate itself to the end, in all pos- 
sible applications to the state of man, 
without the admission of anything un- 
spiritual ; that is, anything positive, dog- 
matic, personal. Thus, the spiritual 
measure of inspiration is the depth of 
the thought, and never, who said it ? And 
so he resists all attempts to palm other 
rules and measures on the spirit than its 
own. 

In action, he easily incurs the char^ 
of antinomianism by his avowal that he, 
who has the Lawgiver, may with safety 
not only neglect, but even contravene 
every written commandment. In the 
play of Othello, the expiring Desdemona 
absolves her husband of the murder, to 
her attendant Emilia. Afterwards, when 
Emilia charges him with the crime, 
Othello exclaims, 

** You beard her say herself it was KOt I,** 
Emilia replies, 

** The more ao^el she, and thou the blacker 
devil,” 

Of this fine incident, Jacobi, the Trans- 
cendental moralist, makes use, with other 
parallel instances, in his reply to Fichte. 
Jacobi, refusing all measure of right and 
wrong except the determinations of the 
private spirit, remarks that there is no 
crime but has sometimes been a virtue. 
"I,” he says, ” am that atheist, that god- 
less person who, in opposition to an ima- 
ginary doctrine of calculation, would lie 
as the dying Desdemona lied; would lie 
and deceive, as Pylades when he person- 
ated Orestes ; would assassinate like 
Timoleon ; would perjure myself, like 
Epaminondas, and John de Witt ; I would 
resolve on suicide like Cato; I would 
commit sacrilege with David ; yea, and 
pluck ears of corn on the Sabbath, for no 
other reason than that I was fainting for 
lack of food. For, I have assurance in 
myself, that, in pardoning these faults 
according to the letter, man exerts the 
sovereign right which the majesty of his 
being confers on him ; he sets the seal 
of his divine nature to the grace he 
accords.” • 

* Colfridge't Traniilatte. 


In like manner, if there is anything 
grand and daring in human thought or 
virtue, any reliance on the vast, the 
unknown; any presentiment; any extra- 
vagance of faith, the spiritualist adopts 
it as most in nature. The Oriental mind 
has always tended to this largeness. 
Buddhism is an expression of it. The 
Buddhist who thanks no man, who says, 
“ Do not flatter your benefactors,” but 
who, in his conviction that every good 
deed can by no possibility escape its 
reward, will not deceive the benefactor 
by pretending that he has done more than 
he should, is a Trauscendentalist. 

You will see by this sketch that there is 
no such thing as a Transcendental party : 
that there is no pure Transcendentalist ; 
that we know of none but prophets and 
heralds of such a philosophy ; that all who 
by strong bias of nature have leaned to 
the spiritual side in doctrine, have 
stopped short of their goal. We have 
had many harbingers and forerunners ; 
but of a purely spiritual life, history has 
afforded no example. I mean, we have 
yet no man who has leaned entirely on 
his character, and eaten angels* food ; 
who, trusting to his sentiments, found 
life made of miracles ; who, working for 
universal aims, found himself fed, he 
knew not how; clothed, slieltered, and 
v.^eaponed, he knew not how, and yet it was 
done by his own hands. Only in the in- 
stinct of the lower animals, we find the 
suggestion of the methods of it, and some- 
thing higher than our understanding. The 
squirrel hoards nuts, and the bee gathers 
honey, without knowing what they do, and 
they are thus provided for without selfish- 
ness or disgrace. 

Shall we say, then, that Transcendenta- 
lism is the Saturnalia or excess of Faith ; 
the presentiment of a faith proper to man 
in his integrity, excessive only when his 
imperfect obedience hinders the satisfac- 
tion of his wish ? Nature is tran.sccnden- 
tal, exists primarily, necessarily, ever 
works and advances, yet takes no thought 
for the morrow. Man owns the dignity 
of the life which throbs around him in 
chemistry, and tree, and animal, and in 
the involuntary functions of his own body ; 
yet he is balked when he tries to fling 
himself into this enchanted circle, where 
all is done without degradation. Yet 
genius and virtue predict in man the 
same absence of private ends, and of con- 
descension to circumstances, united with 
every trait and talent ofbeauty and power, 
way of thinking, falling on Homan 



THB TRANSCENDENTALIST. 


times, made Stoic philosophers; falling 
on despotic times, made patriot Catos 
and Brutuses; falling on Superstitious 
times, made prophets and apostles; on 
popish times, made protestants and 
ascetic monks, preachers of Faith against 
the preachers of Works ; on prelatical 
times, made Puritans and Quakers ; and 
falling on Unitarian and commercial 
times, makes the peculiar shades of 
Idealism which we know. 

It IS well-known to most of my audience, 
that the Idealism of the present day 
acquired the name of Transcendental, 
from the use of that term by Immanuel 
Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the 
sceptical philosophy of Locke, which in- 
sisted that there was nothing in the in- 
tellect which was not previously in the 
experience of the senses, by showing 
that there was a very important 
class of ideas, or imperative forms, 
which did not come by experience, 
but through which experience was 
acquired; that these were intuitions of 
the mind itself ; and he denominated 
them Transcendental forms. The extra- 
ordinary profoundness and precision of 
that man’s thinking have given vogue to 
his nomenclature, in Europe and Ame- 
rica, to that extent, that whatever belongs 
to the class of intuitive thought, is popu- 
larly called at the present day Transcen- 
dental. 

Although, as we have said, there is no 
pure Transcendentalist, yet the tendency 
to respect the intuitions, and to give them 
at least in our creed all authority over 
our experience, has deeply coloured the 
conversation and poetry of the present 
day ; and the history of genius ami of 
religion in these times, though impure, 
and as yet not incarnated in any powerful 
individual, will be the history of this 
tendency. 

It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to 
the closest observer, that many intelligent 
and religious persons withdraw them- 
selves from the common labours and 
competitions of the market and the 
caucus, and partake themselves to a 
certain solitary and critical way of living, 
from which no solid fruit has yet appeared 
to justify their separation. They hold 
themselves aloof ; they feel the dis- 
proportion between their faculties and the 
work offered them, and they prefer to 
ramble in the country and perish of ennui 
to the degradation of such charities and 
such ambitions as the city can propose to 
Ibtm, Thpj are striking wgrki and ory- 


ing out for somewhat worthy to do I What 
they do, is done only because they are 
overpowered by the humanities that speak 
on all sides ; and they consent to such 
labour as is open to them, though to 
their lofty dream the writing of Iliads or 
Hamlets, or the building of cities or 
empires, seems drudgery. 

Now every one must do after his kind, 
be he asp or angel, and these must. The 
question, which a wise man and a student 
of modern history will ask, is, what that 
kind is ? And truly, as in ecclesiastical 
history we take so much pains to know 
what the Gnostics, what the Essenes, what 
the Manichees, and what the Reformers 
believed, it would not misbecome us to 
inquire nearer home, what these com- 
panions and contemporaries of ours think 
and do, at least so far as these thoughts 
and actions appear to be not accidental 
and personal, but common to many, and 
the inevitable flower of the Tree of Time. 
Our American literature and spiritual 
history are, we confess, in the optative 
mood ; but whoso knows these seething 
brains, these admirable radicals, these 
unsocial worshippers, these talkers who 
talk the sun and moon away, will believe 
that this heresy cannot pass away without 
leaving its mark. 

They are lonely; the spirit of their 
writing and conversation is lonely ; they 
repel influences ; they shun general so- 
ciety; they incline to shut themselves in 
their chamber in the house, to live in the 
country rather than in the town, and to 
find their tasks and amusements in soli- 
tude. Society, to be sure, does not like 
this very well ; it saith, Whoso goes to 
walk alone, accuses the whole world ; he 
declareth all to be unfit to be his com- 
panions ; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; 
Society will retaliate. Meantime this re- 
tirement does not proceed from any whim 
on the part of these separators ; but if any 
one will take pains to talk with them, ha 
will find that this part is chosen both from 
temperament and from principle; with 
some unwillingness, too, and as a choice 
of the less of two evils ; for these persons 
are not by nature melancholy, sour, and 
unsocial — they are not stockish or brute— 
but joyous, susceptible, affectionate; they 
have even more than others a great wish to 
be loved. Lika the young Mozart, they 
are rather ready to cry ten times a day, 
** But are you sure you love me ? ” Nay, 
if they tell you their whole thought, they 
will own that love seems to them the last 
aa4 bigbQSt gift of : that there are 

2 C 



MISCELLANIES. 


39a 

persons whom in their hearts they daily 
thank for existing— persons whose faces 
are perhaps unknown to them, but whose 
fame and spirit have penetrated their 
solitude — and for whose sake they wish to 
exist. To behold the beauty of another 
character, which inspires a new interest 
in our own ; to behold the beauty lodged 
in a human being, with such vivacity of 
apprehension, that I am instantly forced 
home to inquire if I am not deformity it- 
self ; to behold in another the expression 
of a love so high that it assures itself— 
assures itself also to me against every 
possible casualty except my unworthiness ; 
these are degrees on the scale of human 
happiness, to which they have ascended ; 
and it is a fidelity to this sentiment which 
has made common association distasteful 
to them. They wish a just and even fel- 
lowship, or none. They cannot gossip 
with you, and they do not wish, as they 
are sincere and religious, to gratify any 
mere curiosity which you may entertain. 
Like fairies, they do not wish to be spoken 
of. Love me, they say, but do not ask 
who is my cousin and my uncle. If you 
do not need to hear my thought, because 
you can read it in my faqe and my beha- 
viour, then I will tell it you from sunrise 
to sunset. If you cannot divine it, you 
would not understand what I say. I will 
not molest myself for you. I do not wish 
to be profaned. 

And yet, it seems as if this loneliness, 
and not this love, would prevail in their 
circumstances, because of the extravagant 
demand they make on human nature. 
That, indeed, constitutes a new feature in 
their portrait, that they are the most 
exacting and extortionate critics Their 
quarrel with every man they meet is not 
with his kind, but with his degree. There 
is not enough of him — that is the only 
fault. They prolong their privilege of 
childhood in this wise, of doing nothing— 
but making immense demands on all the 
gladiators in the lists of action and fame. 
They make us feel the strange disappoint- , 
meni which overcasts every human youth, j 
So many promising youths, and never a i 
finished man I The profound nature will 
have a savage rudeness ; the delicate one 
will be shallow, or the victim of sensi- 
bility; the richly accomplished will have 
some capital absurdity; and so every 
piece has a crack. 'Tis strange, but this 
masterpiece is a result of such an extreme 
delicacy, that the most unobserved flaw 
in the boy will neutralize the most aspiring 
geouiB, and spoil the work Talk with a 


seaman of the hazards to life in his pro 
fession, and he will ask you, “ Where are 
the old sailors ? do you not see ^hat all 
are young men?” And we, on this sea 
of human thought, in like manner inquire. 
Where are the old idealists ? where are 
they who represented to tha last genera- 
tion that extravagant hope, Which a few 
happy aspirants suggest tc ours? In 
looking at the class of counsel, and power, 
and wealth, and at the matronage of the 
land, amidst all the prudence and all the 
triviality, one asks, Where are they who 
represented genius, virtue, the invisible 
and heavenly world, to these ? Are they 
dead — taken in early ripeness to the 
gods— as ancient wisdom foretold their 
fate? Or did the high idea die out of 
them, and leave their unperfumed body 
as its tomb and tablet, announcing to all 
that the celestial inhabitant, who once 
gave them beauty, had departed ? Will it 
be better with the new generation ? We 
easily predict a fair future to each new 
candidate who enters the lists, but we are 
frivolous and volatile, and by low aims 
and ill example do what we can to defeat 
this hope. Then these youths bring us a 
rough but effectual aid, By their uncon- 
cealed dissatisfaction they expose our 
poverty, and the insignificance of man to 
man. A man is a poor limitary bene- 
factor. He ought to be a shower of bene- 
fits — a great influence, which should never 
let his brother go, but should refresh old 
merits continually with new ones ; so 
that, though absent, he should never be 
out of my mind, his name never far from 
my lips ; but if the earth should open at 
my side, or my last hour were come, his 
name should be the prayer I should utter 
to the Universe. But in our experience, 
man is cheap, and friendship wants its 
deep sense. We affect to dwell with our 
friends in their absence, but we do not ; 
when deed word, or letter comes out, 
they let us go. These exacting children 
advertise us of our wants. There is no 
compliment, no smooth speech with them ; 
they pay you only this one compliment, 
of insatiable expectation ; they aspire, 
they severely exact, and if they only stand 
fast in this watch-tower, and persist in 
demanding unto the end, and without end, 
then are they terrible friends, whereof 
poet and priest cannot choose but stand 
m awe ; and what if they eat clouds, and 
drink wind, they have not been without 
service to the race of man. 

With this passion for what is great and 
extraordinaiy# it cannot be wondered at« 



THE TRANSCBNDBNTALIST. 


that they are repelled by vulgarity and 
frivolity in people. They say to them* 
selves, It is better to be alone than in bad 
company. And it is really a wish to be 
met — the wish to find society for their 
hope and religion — which prompts them 
to shun what is called society. They 
feel that they are never so fit for friend- 
ship, as when they have quitted mankind, 
and taken themselves to friend. A 
picture, a book, a favourite spot in the 
hills or the woods, which they can people 
with the fair and worthy creation of the 
fancy, can give them often forms so vivid, 
that these for the time shall seem real, 
and society the illusion. 

But their solitary and fastidious manners 
not only withdraw them from the conver- 
sation, but from the labours of the world ; 
they are not good citizens, not good mem- 
bers of society ; unwillingly they bear 
their part of the public and private 
burdens ; they do not willingly share in 
the public charities, in the public religious 
rites, in the enterprises of education, of 
missions foreign or domestic, in the 
abolition of the slave-trade, or in the 
temperance society. They do not even 
like to vote. The philanthropists inquire 
whether Transcendentalism does not 
mean sloth : they had as lief hear that 
their friend is dead, as that he is a Trans- 
cendentalist ; for then is he paralyzed, 
and can never do anything for humanity. 
What right, cries the good world, has the 
man of genius to retreat from work, and 
indulge himself? The popular literary 
creed seems to be, “ I am a sublime 
genius ; I ought not therefore to labour.” 
But genius is the power to labour better 
and more availably. Deserve thy genius : 
exalt it. The good, the illuminated, sit 
apart from the rest, censuring their dul- 
ness and vices, as if they thought that, by 
Bitting [very grand in their chairs, the 
very brokers, attorneys, and congressmen 
would see the error of their ways, and 
flock to them. But the good and wise 
must learn to act, and carry salvation to 
the combatants and demagogues in the 
dusty arena below. 

On the part of these children, it is re- 
plied, that life and their faculty seem to 
them gifts too rich to be squandered on 
such trifles as you propose to them. 
What you call your fundamental institu- 
tions, your great and holy causes, seem to 
them great abuses, and when nearly seen, 
paltry matters. Each * Cause,' as it is 
called — say Abolition, Temperance, say 
Cftlvinismi qft Unitarianism~~b«Gomes 


39 ! 

speedily a little shop, where the article, 
let it have been at first never so subtle and 
ethereal, is now made up into portable and 
convenient cakes, and retailed in small 
quantities to suit purchasers. You make 
very free use of these words * great' 
and ‘ holy,’ but few things appear to them 
such. Few persons have any mag;nificence 
of nature to inspire enthusiasm, and the 
philanthropies and charities have a cer 
I tain air of quackery. As to the general 
course of living, and the daily employ- 
ments of men, they cannot see much vir- 
tue in these, since they are parts of this 
vicious circle ; and, as no great ends are 
answered by the men, there is nothing 
noble in the arts by which they are main- 
tained. Nay, they have made the experi- 
ment, and found that, from the liberal 
professions to the coarsest manual labour, 
and from the courtesies of the academy 
and the college to the conventions of the 
cotillon-room and the morning call, there 
: is a spirit of cowardly compromise and 
I seeming, which intimates a frightful scep- 
ticism, a life without love, and an activity 
without an aim. 

Unless the action is necessary, unless 
it is adequate, I do not wish to perform it. 
I do not wish to do one thing but once. 
I do not love routine. Once possessed of 
the principle, it is equally easy to make 
four or forty thousand applications of it. 
A great man Will be content to have in- 
dicated in any the slightest manner his 
perception of the reigning Idea of his time, 
and will leave to those who like it the 
multiplication of examples. When he has 
hit the white, the rest may shatter the 
target. Everything admonishes us how 
needlessly long life is. Every moment of 
a hero so raises and cheers us, that a 
twelvemonth is an age. All that the brave 
Xanthus brings home from his wars, is the 
recollection that, at the storming of Samos, 
” in the heat of the battle, Pericles smiled 
on me, and passed on to another detach- 
ment.” It is the quality of the moment, 
not the number of days, of events, or of 
actors, that imports. 

New, we confess, and by no means 
happy, is our condition : if you want the 
aid of our labour, we ourselves stand in 
greater want of the labour. We are miser- 
able with inaction. We perish of restand 
rust : but we do not like your work, 

* Then,* says the world, * show mo your 
own.’ 

* Wo have none.* 

’ What will you do, then ? * cries the 
world. 



S94 MiSCaLlJltiiaS. 


* We will wait,* 

* How long ? ' 

* Until the Universe rises np and calls 
ns to work/ 

* But whilst you wait, you grow old and 
useless.* 

* Be it so : I can sit in a corner and 
perish (as you call it), but I will not move 
until I have the highest command. If no 
call should come for years, for centuries, 
then I know that the want of the Universe 
is the attestation of faith by my abstin- 
ence. Your virtuous projects, so called, 
do not cheer me. I know that which shall 
come will cheer me. If I cannot w'ork, at 
least I need not lie. All that is clearly 
due to-day is not to lie. In other places, 
other men have encountered sharp trials, 
and have behaved themselves well. The 
martyrs were sawn asunder, or hung alive 
on meat-hooks. Cannot we screw our 
courage to patience and truth, and with- 
out complaint, or even with good-humour, 
await our turn of action in the Infinite 
Counsels ? * 

But to come a little closer to the secret 
of these persons, we must say, that to them 
it seems a very easy matter to answer the 
objections of the man of the world, but 
not so easy to dispose of the doubts and 
objections that occur to themselves. They 
are exercised in their own spirit with 
queries, which acquaint them with all ad- 
versity, and with the trials of the bravest 
heroes. When I ask them concerning 
their private experience, they answered 
somewhat in this wise : It is not to be 
denied that there must be some wide dif- 
ference between my faith and other faith.; 
and mine is a certain brief experience, 
which surprised me in the highway or in 
the market, in some place, at some time, 
— whether in the body or out of the body, 
God knoweth — and made me aware that 
I had played the fool with fools all this 
time, but that law existed for me and for 
all ; that to me belonged trust, a child’s 
trust and obedience, and the worship of 
ideas, and I should never be fool more. 
Well, ill the space of an hour, probably, 

I was let down from this height ; I was at 
my old tricks, the selfish member of a sel- 
fish society. My life is superficial, takes 
no root in the deep world ; I ask. When 
shall I die, and be relieved of the respon- 
sibility of seeing an Universe which I do 
not use ? I wish to exchange this flash- 
of-lightning faith for continuous daylight, 
this fever-glow for a benign climate. 

These two states of thou^t diverge 
every moment, and stand la wild coHtriMti > 


To him who looks at his life; from tnesa 
moments of illumination, it will seem that 
he skulks and plays a mean, shiftless, and 
subaltern part in the world. That is to be 
done which he has not skill to do, or to be 
said which others can say better, and he 
lies by, or occupies his hands with soma 
plaything, until his hour comes again. 
Much of our reading, much of our labour, 
seems mere waiting : it was not that we 
were born for. Any other could do it as 
well, or better. So little skill enters into 
these works, so little do they mix with the 
divine life, that it really signifies little 
what we do, whether we turn a grindstone, 
or ride, or run, or make fortunes, or 
govern the state, The worst feature of 
this double consciousness is, that the two 
lives, of the understanding and of the soul, 
which we lead, really show very little re- 
lation to each other, never meet and mea- 
sure each other : one prevails now, all 
buzz and din ; and the other prevails then, 
all infinitude and paradise : and with the 
progress of life, the two discover no 
greater disposition to reconcile themselves. 
Yet, what is my faith ? What am I ? What 
but a thought of deep serenity and inde- 
pendence, an abode in the deep blue sky 7 
Presently the clouds shut down again; 
yet we retain the belief that this petty web 
we weave will at last be overshot and re- 
ticulated with veins of the blue, and that 
the moments will characterise the days. 
Patience, then, is for us, is it not ? Pati- 
ence, and still patience. When we pass, 
as presently we shall, into some new in- 
finitude, out of this Iceland of negations, 
it will please us to reflect that, though wa 
had few virtues or consolations we bore 
with our indigence, nor once strove to re- 
pair it with hypocrisy or false heat of any 
kind. 

But this class are not sufficiently charac- 
terized, if we omit to add that they are 
lovers and worshippers of Beauty. In the 
etenial trinity of Truth, Goodness, and 
Beauty, each in its perfection including 
the three, they prefer to make Beauty the 
sign and head. Something of the same 
taste is observable in all the moral move- 
ments of the time, in the religious and 
benevolent enterprises. They have a 
liberal, even an aesthetic spirit. A refer- 
ence to Beauty in action sounds, to be 
sure, a little hollow and ridiculous in the 
ears^of the old church. In politics, it has 
often sufficed, when they treated of justice, 
if they kept the bounds of selfish calcula- 
tion. If they granted restitution, it was 

wbi«b graot«4 it. 6ut tbo justice 



THE TitAlfSCENDEtifALIST. 


fl^hfch now Claimed for the black, and 
the pauper, and the drunkard, is for 
Beauty — is for a necessity to the soul of 
the agent, not of the beneficiary. I say, 
this is the tendency, not yet the realiza- 
tion. Our virtue totters ahd trips, does 
not yet walk firmly. Its representatives 
are austere ; they preach and denounce ; 
their rectitude is not yet a grace. They 
are still liable to that slight taint of bur- 
lesque which, in our strange world, attaches 
to the zealot. A saint should be as dear 
as the apple of the eye. Yet we are 
tempted to smile, and we flee from the 
working to the speculative reformer, to 
escape that same slight ridicule. Alas for 
these days of derision and criticism I We 
call the Beautiful the highest, because it 
appears to us the golden mean, escaping 
the dowdiness of the good, and the heart- 
lessness of the true. They are lovers of 
nature also, and find an indemnity in the 
inviolable order of the world for the violated 
order and grace of man. 

There is, no doubt, a great deal of well- 
founded objection to be spoken or felt 
against the sayings and doings of this 
class, some of whose traits we have 
■elected ; no doubt, they will lay them- 
■elves open to criticism and to lampoons, 
and as ridiculous stories will be to be 
told of them as of any. There will be 
cant and pretension ; there will be subtilty 
and moonshine. These persons are of 
unequal strength, and do not all prosper. 
They complain that everything around 
them must be denied ; [and if feeble, it 
takes all their strength to deny, before 
they can begin to lead their own life. 
Grave seniors insist on their respect to 
this institution, and that usage ; to an 
obsolete history; to some vocation, or 
college, or etiquette, or beneficiary, or 
charity, or morning or evening call, which 
they resist, as what does not concern 
them. But it costs such sleepless nights, 
alienations and misgivings — they have so 
many moods about it — these old guardians 
never change their minds ; they have but 
one mood on the subject, namely, that 
Anthony is very perverse— that it is quite 
as much as Antony can do, to assert his 
rights, abstain from what he thinks fool- 
ish, and keep his temper. He cannot 
help the reaction of this injustice in his 
own mind. He is braced up and stilted ; 
all freedom and flowing genius, all sallies 
of wit and frolic nature are quite ont of 
the question ; it is well if he can keep from 
lying, injustice, and suicide. This is no 
lime for gaiety and grace* His strength 


395 

I and spirits are wasted in rejection. But 
the strong spirits overpower those around 
them without effort. Their thought and 
emotion comes in like a flood, quite with- 
draws them from all notice of these carp- 
ing critics; they surrender themselves 
with glad heart to the heavenly guide, and 
only by implication reject the clamorous 
nonsense of the hour. Grave seniors talk 
to the deaf — church and old book mumble 
and ritualize to an unheeding, preoccupied 
and advancing mind, and thus they by 
happiness of greater momentum lose no 
time, but take the right road at first. 

But all these of whom I speak are not 
proficients ; they are novices ; they only 
show the road in which man should travel, 
when the soul has greater health and 
prowess. Yet let them feel the dignity of 
their charge, and deserve a larger power. 
Their heart is the ark in which the fire is 
concealed, which shall burn in a broader 
and universal flame. Let them obey the 
Genius then most when his impulse is 
wildest ; then most when he seems to lead 
to uninhabitable deserts of thought and 
life ; for the path which the hero travels 
alone is the highway of health and benefit 
to mankind. What is the privilege and 
nobility of our nature, but its persistency, 
through its power to attach itself to what 
is permanent ? 

Society also has its duties in reference 
to this class, and must behold them with 
what charity it can. Possibly some 
benefit may yet accrue from them to the 
state. In our Mechanics’ Fair, there 
must be not only bridges, ploughs, car- 
penters’ planes, and baking-troughs, but 
also some few finer instruments— rain- 
gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; 
and in society, besides farmers, sailors, 
and weavers, there must be a few persons 
of purer fire kept specially as gauges and 
meters of character; persons of a fine, 
detecting instinct, who betray the smallest 
accumulations of wit and feeling in the 
bystander. Perhaps too there might be 
room for the exciters and monitors; col- 
lectors of the heavenly spark with power 
to convey the electricity to others. Or, as 
the storm-tossed vessel at sea speaks the 
frigate or “line packet” to learn its 
longitude, so it may not be without its 
advantage that we should now and then 
encounter rare and gifted men, to com- 
pare the points of our spiritual compass, 
and verify our bearings from superior 
chronometers. 

Amidst the downward tendency and 
proneness of things, when every voice ti 



396 


ailSC6LLAtttB$. 


raised (of & flew foad or another statute, 
or a subscription of stock, for an improve- 
ment in dress, or in dentistry, for a new 
house or a larger business, for a political 
party, or the division of an estate — will 
you not tolerate one or two solitary voices 
in the land, speaking for thoughts and 
principles not marketable or perishable ? 
Soon these improvements and mechanical 
inventions will be superseded ; these 
modes of living lost out of memory ; these 
cities rotted, ruined by war, by new inven- 
tions, by new seats of trade, or the geo- 


logic changes— all gone, like the shells 
which sprinkle the sea-beach with a white 
colony to-day, forever renewed to be for- 
ever destroyed. But the thoughts which 
these few hermits strove to proclaim by 
silence, as well as by speech, not only by 
what they did, but by what they forbore 
to do, shall abide in beauty and strength 
to reorganise themselves in nature, to in- 
vest themselves anew in other, perhaps 
higher endowed and happier mixed clay 
than ours, in fuller union with the sur- 
rounding system. 


THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 

A Lbcturb Rbad before the Mercantile Library Association, 
Boston, February 7, 1844. 


Gentlemen 

It is remarkable that our people have 
their intellectual culture from one country, 
and their duties from another. This 
false state of things is newly in a way to 
be corrected. America is beginning to 
assert itself to the senses and to the ima- 
gination of her children, and Europe is 
receding in the same degree. This their 
reaction on education gives a new impor- 
tance to the internal improvements and 
to the politics of the country. Who has 
not been stimulated to reflection by the 
facilities now in progress of construction 
for travel and the transportation of goods 
in the United States ? 

This rage for road-building is beneficent 
for America, where vast distance is so 
main a consideration in our domestic 
politics and trade, inasmuch as the great 
political promise of the invention is to 
hold the Union stanch, whose days seemed 
already numbered by the mere inconve- 
nience of transporting representatives, 
judges, and officers across such tedious 
distances of land and water. Not only is 
distance annihilated, but when, as now, 
the locomotive and the steamboat, like 
enormous shuttles, shoot every day across 
the thousand various threads of national 
descent and employment, and bind them 
fast in one web, an hourly assimilation 
goes forward, and there is no danger that 
local peculiarities and hostilities should 
be preserved. 

I. But I hasten to 8peak>£ the utility 
of these improvements in creating an 
American sentiment. An unlooked-for 
consequence of the railroad is the in- 
creased acquaintance it has given the 


American people with the boundless re- 
sources of their own soil. If this inven 
tion has reduced England to a third oi 
its size, by bringing people so much 
nearer, in this country it has given a new 
celerity to time, or anticipated by fifly 
years the planting of tracts of land, the 
choice of water-privileges, the working of 
mines, and other natural advantages. 
Railroad iron is a magician’s rod, in its 
power to evoke the sleeping energies of 
land and water. 

The railroad is but one arrow in our 
quiver, though it has great value as a sort 
of yard-stick, and surveyor’s line. The 
bountiful continent is ours. State on State, 
and territory on territory, to the waves of 
the Pacific Sea ; 

Our garden is the immeasurable earth, 

The oeaven's blue pillars are Medea’a 
house,'* 

The task of surveying, planting, and 
building upon this immense tract requires 
an education and a sentiment commen- 
surate thereto. A consciousness of this 
fact is beginning to take the place of the 
purely trading spirit and education which 
sprang up whilst all the population lived 
on the fringe of sea-coast. And even on 
the coast prudent men have begun to see 
that every American should be educated 
with a view to the values of land. The 
arts of engineering and of architecture 
are studied; scientific agriculture is an 
object of growing attention : the mineral 
riches are explored, limestone, coal, slate, 
and iron ; and the value of timber-lands 
is enhanced. 



THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 


Columbus alleged as a reason for seek- 
ing a continent in the West, that the har- 
mony of nature required a great tract of 
land in the western hemisphere, to balance 
the known extent of land in the eastern ; 
and it now appears that we must estimate 
the native values of this broad region to 
redress the balance of our own judgments, 
and appreciate the advantages opened to 
the human race in this country, which is 
our fortunate home. The land is the 
appointed remedy for whatever is false 
and fantastic in our culture. The conti- 
nent we inhabit is to be physic and food 
for our mind, as well as our body. The 
land, with its tranquillising, sanative in- 
fluences, is to repair the errors of a 
scholastic and traditional education, and 
bring us into just relations with men and 
things. 

The habit of living in the presence of 
these invitations of natural wealth is not 
inoperative ; and this habit, combined 
with the moral sentiment which, in the 
recent years, has interrogated every insti- 
tution, usage, and law, has, naturally, 
given a strong direction to the wishes and 
aims of active young men to withdraw 
from cities, and cultivate the soil. This 
inclination has appeared in the most 
unlooked-for quarters, in men supposed 
to be absorbed in business, and in those 
connected with the liberal professions. 
And since the walks of trade were crowded, 
whilst that of agriculture cannot easily 
be, inasmuch as the farmer who is not 
wanted by others can yet grow his own 
bread, whilst the manufacturer or the 
trader, who is not wanted cannot— this 
seemed a happy tendency. For, beside 
all the moral benefit which we may expect 
from the farmer’s profession, when a man 
enters it considerately, this promised the 
conquering of the soil, plenty, and beyond 
this, the adorning of the country with j 
every advantage and ornament which 
labour, ingenuity, and affection for a 
man’s home could suggest. 

Meantime, with cheap land, and the 
pacific disposition of the people, every 
thing invites to the arts of agriculture, of 
gardening, and domestic architecture. 
Public gardens, on the scale of such plan- 
tations in Europe and Asia, are now 
unknown to us. There is no feature of 
the old countries that strikes an American 
with more agreeable surprise than the 
beautiful gardens of Europe ; such as the 
Boboli in Florence, the Villa Borghese in 
Rome, the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, the gar- 
dens at Munich, and at Frankfort on the 


397 

Maine : works easily imitated here, and 
which might well make the land dear to 
the citizen, and inflame patriotism. It is 
the fine art which is left for us, now that 
sculpture, painting, and religious and civil 
architecture have become effete, and have 
passed into second childhood. We have 
twenty degrees of latitude wherein to 
choose a seat, and the new modes of 
travelling enlarge the opportunity of 
selection, by making it easy to cultivate 
very distant tracts, and yet remain in 
strict intercourse with the centres of trade 
and population. And the whole force of 
all the arts goes to facilitate the decora- 
tion of lands and dwellings. A garden 
has this advantage, that it makes it indif- 
ferent where you live. A well-laid garden 
makes the face of the country of no 
account; let that be low or high, grand or 
mean, you have made a beautiful abode 
worthy of man. If the landscape is pleas- 
ing, the garden shows it — if tame, it 
excludes it. A little grove, which any 
farmer can find, or cause to grow near his 
house, will, in a few years make cataracts 
and chains of mountains quite unneces- 
sary to his scenery; and he is so con- 
tented with his alleys, woodlands, 
orchards, and river, that Niagara, and 
the Notch of the White Hills, and Nan- 
tasket Beach, are superfluities. And yet 
the selection of a fit house-lot has the 
same advantage over an indifferent one, 
as the selection to a given employment of 
a man who has a genius for that work. 
In the last case, the culture of years will 
never make the most painstaking appren- 
tice his equal : no more will gardening 
give the advantage of a happy site to a 
house in a bole or on a pinnacle. In 
America, we have hitherto little to boast 
in this kind. The cities drain the coun- 
try of the best part of its population : the 
flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes 
into the towns, and the country is culti- 
vated by a so much inferior class. The 
land — travel a whole day together— looks 
poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain 
and poor. In Europe, where society has 
an aristocratic structure, the land is full 
of men of the best stock, and the best 
culture, whose interest and pride it is to 
remain half the year on their estates, and 
to fill them with every convenience and 
ornament. Of course, these make model 
farms, and model architecture, and are a 
constant education to the eye of the sur- 
rounding population. Whatever events 
in progress shall go to disgust men with 
cities, and infuse into them the passion 



HISCBLLA^IBS. 


398 

for country life, land country pleasures, 
will render a service to the whole 
face of this continent, and will further 
the most poetic of all the occupations 
of real life, the bringing out by art 
the native but hidden graces of the land- 
■cape. 

I look on such improvements, also, as 
directly tending to endear the land to the 
inhabitant. Any relation to the land, the 
habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even 
hunting on it, generates the feeling of 
patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, 
or he who merely uses it as a support to 
his desk and ledger, or to his manufac- 
tory, values it less. The vast majority of 
the people of this country live by the 
land, and carry its quality in their man- 
ners and opinions. We in the Atlantic 
States, by position, have been commer- 
cial, and have, as I said, imbibed easily 
an European culture. Luckily for us, 
now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic 
to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is in- 
truding a new and continental element 
into the national mind, and we shall yet 
have an American genius. How much 
better when the whole land is a garden, 
and the people have grown up in the 
bowers of a paradise. Without looking, 
then, to those extraordinary social in- 
fluences which are now acting in precisely 
this direction, but only at what is inevi- 
tably doing around us, I think we must 
regard the land as a commanding and 
increasing power on the citizen, the 
■anative and Americanising influence, 
which promises to disclose new virtues 
for ages to come. 

2. In the second place, the uprise and 
culmination of the new and anti-feudal 
power of Commerce is the political fact 
of most significance to the American 
at this hour. 

We cannot look on the freedom of this 
country, in connection with its youth, 
without a presentiment that here shall laws 
and institutions exist on some scale of 
proportion to the majesty of nature. To 
men legislating for the area betwixt the 
two oceans, betwixt the snows and the 
tropics, somewhat of the granduer of 
nature will infuse itself into the code. A 
heterogeneous population crowding on all 
ships from all corners of the world to the 
great gates of North America, namely, 
Boston, New York, and New Orleans, and 
thence proceeding inward to the prairie 
and the mountains, and quickly contribut- 
ing their private thought to the public 
opinion their toU the treasury, and 


their vote to the election, it cannot bo 
doubted that the legislation of this country 
should become more catholic and cosmo- 
politan than that of any other. It seems 
so easy for America to inspire and express 
the most expansive and humane spirit; 
new-born, free, healthful, strong, the land 
of the labourer, of the democrat, of the 
philanthropist, of the believer, of the saint, 
she could speak for the human race. It 
is the country of the Future. From Wash- 
ington, proverbially “ the city of magnifi- 
cent distances," through all its cities. 
States, and Territories, it is a country of 
beginnings, of projects, of designs, and 
expectations. 

Gentlemen, there is a sublime and 
friendly Destiny by which the human race 
is guided — the race never dying, the indi- 
vidual never spared — to results affecting 
masses and ages. Men are narrow and 
selfish, but the Genius or Destiny is not 
narrow, but beneficient. It is not dis- 
covered in their calculated and voluntary 
activity, but in what befalls, with or with- 
out their design. Only what is inevitable 
interests us, and it turns out that love and 
good are inevitable, and in the course of 
I things. That Genius has infused itself 
into nature. It indicates itself by a small 
excess of good, a small balance in brute 
facts always favourable to the side of rea- 
son. All the facts in any part of nature 
shall be tabulated, and the results shall 
indicate the same security and benefit ; so 
slight as to be hardly observable, and yet 
it is there. The sphere is flattened at the 
poles, and swelled at the equator ; a form 
flowing necesssrily from the fluid state, 
yet the form, the mathematican assures 
us, required to prevent the protuberances 
of the continent, or even of lesser moun- 
tains cast up at any time by earthquakes, 
from continually deranging the axis of the 
earth. The census of the population is 
found to keep an invariable equality in the 
sexes, with a trifling predominance in 
favour of the male, as if to counterbalance 
the necessarily increased exposure of male 
life in war, navigation, and other accidents. 
Remark the unceasing effort throughout 
nature at somewhat better than the actual 
creatures ; amelioration in nature, which 
alone permits and authorizes amelioration 
in mankind. The population of the world 
is a conditional population ; these are not 
the best, but the best that could live in 
the existing state of soils, gases, animalsf 
and morals : the best that could yet live; 
there shall be a better, please God. This 
Geniui, or Deitiny, ti of the sternest ad- 



THE YOUtlG AMERICAS. 


ministration, though rumours exist of its 
secret tenderness. It may be styled a 
cruel kindness, serving the whole even to 
the ruin of the member ; a terrible com- 
munist, reserving all profits to the com- 
munity, without dividend to individuals. 
Its law is, you shall have everything 
as a member, nothing to yourself. For 
Nature is the noblest engineer, yet uses a 
grinding economy, working up all that is 
wasted to-day into to-morrow's creation; 
not a superfluous grain of sand, for all the 
ostentation she makes of expense and 
public works. It is because Nature thus 
saves and uses, labouring for the general, 
that we poor particulars are so crushed 
and straitened, and find it so hard to live. 
She flung us out in her plenty, but we 
cannot shed a hair, or a paring of a nail, 
but instantly she snatches at the shred, 
and appropriates it to the general stock. 
Our condition is like that of the poor' 
wolves : if one of the flock wound himself, 
or so much as limp, the rest eat him up 
incontinently. 

The serene Power interposes the check 
upon the caprices and officiousness of our 
wills. Its charity is not our charity. One 
of its agents is our will, but that which 
expresses itself in our will is stronger than 
our will. We are very forward to help it, 
but it will not be accelerated. It resists 
our meddling, eleemosynarycontrivances. 
We devise sumptuary and relief laws, but 
the principle of population is always re- 
ducing wages to the lowest pittance on ' 
which human life can be sustained. We 
legislate against forestalling and monopoly; 
we would have a common granary for the 
poor ; but the selfishness which hordes the 
corn for high prices, is the preventive of 
famine ; and the law of self-preservation 
is surer policy than any legislation can be. 
We concoct eleemosynary systems, and it 
turns out that our charity increases pau- 
perism. We inflate our paper currency, 
we repair commerce with unlimited credit, 
and are presently visited with unlimited 
bankruptcy. 

It is easy to see that the existing gene- 
ration are conspiring with a beneficence, 
which, in its working for coming genera- | 
tions, sacrifices the passing one, which 
infatuates the most selfish men to act 
against their private interest for the public 
welfare. We build railroads, we know not 
for what or for whom ; but one thing is 
certain, that we who build will receive the 
very smallest share of benefit. Benefit 
will accrue; they are essential to the 
country, but that will be felt not until we 


m 

' are no longer couflfrymehc We do the 
like in all matters : — 

** Man's heart the Almighty to the Future set 
By secret and inviolable springs." 

We plant trees, we build stone houses, we 
redeem the waste, we make prospective 
laws, we found colleges and hospitals, for 
remote generations. We should be mor- 
tified to learn that the little benefit wo 
chanced in our own persons to receive 
was the utmost they would yield. 

The history of commerce is the record 
of this beneficent tendency. The patri- 
archal form of government readily becomes 
despotic, as each person may see in his 
own family. Fathers wish to be the 
fathers of the minds of their children, 
and behold with impatience a new cha- 
racter and way of thinking presuming to 
show itself in their own son or daughter. 
This feeling, which all their love and pride 
in the powers of their children cannot 
subdue, becomes petulance and tyranny 
when the head of the clan, the emperor 
of an empire, deals with the same differ- 
ence of opinion in his subjects. Diflerenca 
of opinion is the one crime which kings 
never forgive. An empire is an immense 
egotism. "I am the State," said the 
French Louis, When a French ambas- 
sador mentioned to Paul of Russia, that a 
man of consequence in St. Petersburg was 
interesting himself in some matter, the 
Czar interrupted him : " There is no man 
of consequence in this empire, but he with 
whom I am actually speaking ; and so 
long only as I am speaking to him, is he 
of any consequence." And Nicholas, the 
present emperor, is reported to have said 
to his council ; " The age is embarrassed 
with new opinions; rely on me, gentle- 
men, I shall oppose an iron will to the 
progress of liberal opinions." 

It is easy to see that this patriarchal or 
family management gets to be rather 
troublesome to all but the papa; the 
sceptre comes to be a crow-bar. And 
this unpleasant egotism. Feudalism op- 
poses, and finally destroys. The king is 
compelled to call in the aid of his brothers 
and cousins, and remote relations, to help 
him keep his overgrown house in order ; 
and this club of noblemen always come at 
last to have a will of their own; they 
combine to brave the sovereign, and call 
in the aid of the people. Each chief 
attaches as many followers as he can, by 
kindness, maintenance, and gifts ; and as 
long as war lasts. th« nobles, who must be 



MISCELLANIES. 


400 

soldiers, rule very well. But when peace 
comes, the nobles prove very whimsical 
and uncomfortable masters ; their frolics 
turn out to be insulting and degrading to 
the commoner. Feudalism grew to be a 
bandit and brigand. 

Meantime Trade had begun to appear : 
Trade, a plant which grows wherever 
there is peace, as soon as there is peace, 
and as long as there is peace. The luxury 
and necessity of the noble fostered it. 
And as quickly as men go to foreign parts, 
in ships or caravans, a new order of things 
springs up; new command takes place, 
new servants and new masters. Their 
information, their wealth, their corre- 
spondence, have made them quite other 
men than left their native shore. 
are nobles now, and by another patent 
than the king’s. Feudalism had been 
good, had broken the power of the kings, 
and had some good traits of its own ; but 
it had grown mischievous, it was time for 
it to die, and, as they say of dying people, 
all its faults came out. Trade was the 
strong man that broke it down, and raised 
a new and unknown power in its place. It 
is a new agent in the world, and one of 
great function ; it is a very intellectual 
force. This displaces physical strength 
and installs computation, combination, in- 
formation, science, in its room. It calls 
out all force of a certain kind that slum- 
bered in the former dynasties. It is now 
in the midst of its career. Feudalism is 
not ended yet. Our governments still 
partake largely of that element. Trade 
goes to make the governments insignifi- 
cant, and to bring every kind of faculty 
of every individual that can in any manner 
serve any person, on sale. Instead of a 
huge Army and Navy, and Executive De- 
partments, itjCon verts Government into an 
Intelligence-Office, where every man may 
find what he wishes to buy, and expose 
what he has to sell, not only produce and 
manufactures, but art, skill, and intellec- 
tual and moral values. This is the good 
and this the evil of trade, that it would 
put everything into market, talent, beauty, 
virtue, and man himself. 

By this means, however, it has done its 
work. It has its faults, and will come to 
an end, as the others do. The philoso- 
pher and lover of man have much harm to 
say of trade ; but the (historian will see 
that trade was the principle of Liberty ; 
that trade planted America and destroyed 
Feudalism ; that it makes peace and 
keeps peace, and it will abolish slavery. 
We complain of its oppression of the poor, 


and of its building up a new aristocracy 
on the ruins of the aristocracy it destroyed. 
But the aristocracy of trade has no per- 
manence, is not entailed, was the result of 
toil and talent, the result of merit of some 
kind, and is continually falling, like the 
waves of the sea, before new claims of the 
same sort. Trade is an instrument in the 
hands of that friendly Power, which works 
for us in our own despite. We design it 
thus and thus ; it turns out otherwise and 
far better. This beneficent tendency, om- 
nipotent without violence, exists and 
works. Every line of history inspires a 
confidence that we shall not go far wrong ; 
that things mend. That is the moral of 
all we learn, that it warrants Hope, the 
prolific mother of reforms. Our part is 
plainly not to throw ourselves across the 
track, to block improvement, and sit 
till we are stone, but to watch the uprise 
of successive mornings, and to conspire 
with the new works of new days. Govern- 
ment has been a fossil ; it should be a 
plant. I conceive that the office of statute 
law should be to express, and not to im- 
pede the mind of mankind. New thoughts, 
new things. Trade was one instrument, 
but Trade is also but for a time, and must 
give way to somewhat broader and better, 
whose signs are already dawning in the 
sky. 

3. I pass to speak of the signs of that 
which is the sequel of trade. 

In consequence of the revolution in the 
state of society wrought by trade, govern- 
ment in our times is beginning to wear a 
clumsy and cumbrous appearance. We 
have already seen our way to shorter 
methods. The time is full of good signs. 
Some of them shall ripen to fruit. All 
this beneficent socialism is a friendly 
omen, and the swelling cry of voices for 
the education of the people, indicates that 
Government has other offices than those 
of banker and executioner. Witness the 
new movements in the civilized world, the 
Communism of France, Germany, and 
Switzerland ; the Trades’ Unions ; the 
English League against the Corn I^ws; 
and the whole Industrial Statistics^ so 
called. In Paris, the blouse, the badge of 
the operative, has begun to make its ap- 
pearance in the saloons. Witness, too, 
the spectacle of three Communities which 
have within a very short time sprung up 
within the Commonwealth, besides several 
others undertaken by citizens of Massa- 
chusetts within the territory of other 
States. These proceeded from a variety 
of motivesi from an impatience oi many 



tUB YOVNO 

ttiages In common life, from a wish for 
greater freedom than the manners and 
opinions of society permitted, but in great 
part from a feeling that the true offices of 
the State, the State had let fall to the 
ground ; that in the scramble of parties for 
the public purse, the main duties of Go- 
vernment were omitted— the duty to in- 
struct the ignorant, to supply the poor 
with work and with good guidance. These 
communists preferred the agricultural 
life as the most favourable condition for 
human culture ; but they thought that 
the farm, as wo manage it, did not satisfy 
the right ambition of man. The farmer, 
after sacrificing, pleasure, taste, freedom, 
thought, love, to his work, turns out often 
a bankrupt, like the merchant. This re- 
sult might well seem astounding. All this 
drudgery, from cock-crowing to starlight, 
for all these years, to end in mortgages 
and the auctioneer's flag, and removing 
from bad to worse. It is time to have the 
thing looked into, and with a sifting criti- 
cism ascertained who is the fool. It 
seemed a great deal worse, because the 
farmer is living in the same town with 
men who pretend to know exactly what 
he wants. On one side, is agricultural 
chemistry, coolly exposing the nonsense 
of our spendthrift agriculture and ruinous 
expense of manures, and offering by 
means of a teaspoonful of artificial guano, 
to turn a sandbank into corn ; and, on the 
other, the farmer, not only eager for the 
information, but with bad crops and in 
debt and bankruptcy, for want of it. Here 
are Etzlers and mechanical projectors, 
who, with the Fourierists, undoubtingly 
affirm that the smallest union would make 
every man rich ; and, on the other side, a 
multitude of poor men and women seeking 
work, and who cannot find enough to pay 
their board. The science is confident, 
and surely the poverty is real. If any 
means could be found to bring these two 
together I 

This was one design of the projectors of 
the Associations which are now making 
their first feeble experiments. They were 
founded in love, and in labour. They pro- 
posed, as you know, that all men should 
take a part in the manual toll, and pro- 
posed to amend the condition of men, by 
substituting harmonious for hostile in- 
dustry. It was a noble thought of Fourier, 
which gives a favourable idea of his sys- 
tem, to distinguish in his Phalanx a class 
as the Sacred Band, by whom whatever 
duties were disa^eeable, and likely to be 
omittedt were to be assumed, 


AMERICAS. 401 

At least, an economical success 
certain for the enterprise, and that agri- 
cultural association must, sooner or later, 
fix the price of bread, and drive single 
farmers into association, in self-defence ; 
as the great commercial and manufactur- 
ing companies had already done. The 
Community is only the continuation of 
the same movement which made the joint- 
stock companies for manufactures, min- 
I ing, insurance, banking, and so forth. It 
has turned out cheaper to make calico by 
companies; and it is proposed to plant 
corn, and to bake bread by companies. 

Undoubtedly, abundant mistakes will 
be made by these first adventurers, which 
will draw ridicule on their schemes, 1 
think, for example, that they exaggerate 
the importance of a favourite project of 
theirs, that of paying talent and labour at 
one rate, paying all sorts of service at one 
rate, say ten cents the hour. They have 
paid it so ; but not an instant would a 
dime remain a dime. In one hand it be- 
came an eagle as it fell, and in another 
hand a copper cent. For the whole value 
of the dime is in knowing what to do with 
it. One man buys with it a land-title 
of an Indian, and makes his posterity 
princes ; or buys corn enough to feed the 
world ; or pen, ink, and paper, or a pain- 
ter’s brush, by which he can communicate 
himself to the human race as if he were 
fire; and the other buys barley candy. 
Money is of no value; it cannot spend 
itself. All depends on the skill of the 
spender. Whether, too, the objection 
almost universally felt by such women in 
the community as were mothers, to an 
associate life, to a common table, and a 
common nursery, &c., setting a higher 
value on the private family with poverty, 
than on an association with wealth, will 
not prove insuperable, remains to be 
determined. 

But the Communities aimed at a higher 
success in securing to all their members 
an equal and thorough education. And 
on the whole, one may say, that aims so 
generous, and so forced on them by the 
times, will not be relinquished, even il 
these attempts fail, but will be prosecuted 
until they succeed. 

This is the value of the Communities ; 
not what they have done, but the revolu- 
tion which they indicate as on the way, 
Yes, government must educate the poor 
man. Look across the country &om any 
hillside around us, and the landscape 
seem to crave government. The actual 
difforences of men must be acknowledge^ 



MlSCSLLAmiSS. 


4M 

atid met with l6Ve and wiadom. These 
rising grounds which command the cam- 
paign below, seem to ask for lords, true 
lords, land-lordSt who understand the 
land and its uses, and the applicabilities 
of men, and whose government would be 
what it should, namely, mediation between 
want and supply. How gladly would each 
citizen pay a commission for the support 
and continuation of good guidance. None 
should be a governor who has not a talent 
for governing. Now many people have a 
native skill for carving out business for 
many hands ; a genius for the disposition 
of affairs; and are never happier than 
when difficult practical questions, which 
embarrass other men, are to be solved. 
All lies in light before them ; they are in 
their element. Could any means be 
contrived to appoint only these. There 
really seems a progress towards such a 
state of things, in which this work shall be 
done by these natural workmen ; and this 
not certainly through any increased dis- 
cretion shown by the citizens at elections, 
but by the gradual contempt into which 
official government falls, and the increas- 
ing disposition of private adventurers to 
assume its fallen functions. Thus the 
costly Post Office is likely to go into disuse 
before the private transportation-shop of 
Hamden and his competitors. The cur- 
rency threatens to fall entirely into private 
hands. Justice is continually adminis- 
tered more and more by private reference, 
and not by litigation. We have feudal 
governments in a commercial age. It 
would be but an easy extension of our 
commercial system, to pay a private 
emperor a fee for services, as we pay an 
architect, an engineer, or a lawyer. If 
any man has a talent for righting wrong, 
for administering difficult affairs, for 
counselling poor farmers how to turn 
their estates to good husbandry, for com- 
bining a hundred private enterprises to a 
general benefit, let him in the county- 
town, or in Court Street, put up his sign- 
board, Mr. Smith, Governor^ Mr. Johnson, 
Working king. 

How can our young men complain of 
the poverty of things in New England, 
and not feel that poverty as a demand on 
their charity to make New England rich ? 
Where is he who seeing a thousand men 
useless and unhappy, and making the 
whole region forlorn by their inaction, 
and conscious himself of possessing the 
faculty they want, does not hear his call 
to go and be their king ? 

We must have kings, and we moat hare 


nobles. Nature pf6vides such In 
society— only let us have the real instead 
of the titular. Let us have our leading 
and our inspiration from the best. In 
every society some men are bom to rule, 
and some to advise. Let the powers be 
well directed, directed by love, and they 
would everywhere be greeted with joy and 
honour. The chief is the chief all the world 
over, only not his cap and his plume. It is 
only their dislike of the pretender, which 
makes men sometimes unjust to the accom- 
plished man. If society were transparent, 
the noble would everywhere be gladly 
received and accredited, and would not be 
asked for his day’s work, but would be 
felt as benefit, inasmuch as he was noble. 
That were his duty and stint —to keep 
himself pure and purifying, the leaven of 
his nation. I think I see place and duties 
for a nobleman in every society ; but it is 
not to drink wineand ride in a fine coach, 
but to guide and adorn life for the multi, 
tude by forethought, by elegant studies, 
by perseverance, self-devotion, and the 
remembrance of the humble old friend, 
by making his life secretly beautiful. 

I call upon you, young men, to obey 
your heart, and be the nobility of this 
land. In every age of the world, there 
has been a leading nation, one of a more 
generous sentiment, whose eminent citi- 
zens were willing to stand for the interests 
of general justice and humanity, at the 
risk of being called, by the men of the 
moment, chimerical and fantastic. Which 
should be that nation but these States ? 
Which should lead that movement, if not 
New England ? Who should lead the 
leaders, but the Young American ? The 
people, and the world, is now suffering 
from the want of religion and honour in 
its public mind. In America, out of doors 
all seems a market ; in doors, an air-tight 
stove of conventionalism. Everybody who 
comes into our houses savours of these 
habits ; the men, of the market ; the women, 
of the custom. I find no expression in 
our state papers or legislative debate, in 
our lyceums or churches, specially in our 
newspapers, of a high national feeling, no 
lofty counsels that rightfully stir the blood. 
I speak of those organs which can be pre- 
sumed to speak a popular sense, They 
recommend conventional virtues, what- 
ever will earn and preserve property; 
always the capitalist; the college, the 
church, the hospital, the theatre, the 
hotel, the road, the ship, of the capitalist 
— whatever goes to secure, adorn, enlarge 
these, is good; what Jeopardizes any el 



THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 


theie ii damnable. The * opposition' 
papers, so called, are on the same side. 
They attack the great capitalist, but with 
the aim to make a capitalist of the poor 
man. The opposition is against those 
who have money, from those who wish to 
have money. But who announces to us 
in journal or in pulpit, or in the street, 
the secret of heroism, 

** Man alone 

Can perform the impossible ? '• 

I shall not need to go into an enumera- 
tion of our national defects and vices 
which require this Order of Censors in 
the state. I might not set down our most 
proclaimed offences as the worst. It is 
not often the worst trait that occasions 
the loudest outcry. Men complain of their 
suffering, and not of the crime. I fear 
little from the bad effect of Repudiation ; I 
do not fear that it will spread. Stealing is 
a suicidal business ; you cannot repudiate 
but once. But the bold face and tardy 
repentance permitted to this local mischief 
reveal a public mind so preoccupied 
with the love of gain, that the common 
sentiment of indignation at fraud does not 
act with its natural force. The more need 
of a withdrawal from the crowd, and a 
resort to the fountain of right, by the 
brave, The timidity of our public opinion, 
is our disease, or, shall I say, the public- 
ness of opinion the absence of private 
opinion. Good-nature is plentiful, but 
we want justice, with heart of steel, to 
fight down the proud. The private mind 
has access to the totality of goodness and 
truth, that it may be a balance to a corrupt 
society ; and to stand for the private verdict 
against popular clamour, is the office of 
the noble. If a humane measure is pro- 
pounded in behalf of the slave, or of the 
Irishman, or the Cathohe, or for the suc- 
cour of the poor, that sentiment, that 
project, will have the homage of the hero. 
That is his nobility, his oath of knight- 
hood, to succour the helpless and oppress- 
ed ; always to throw himself on the side 
of weakness, of youth, of hope ; on the 
liberal, on the expansive side, never on 
the defensive, the conserving, the timor- 
ous, the lock and bolt system. More than 
our good-will we may not be able to give. 
We have our own affairs, our own genius, 
which chains us to our proper work. We 
cannot give our life to tlie cause of the 
debtor, of the slave, or the pauper, as 
another is doing ; but to one thing we are 
bouod. agt to blaspheme the seutimeatand 


W 

the work of that man, not to throw stum* 

bling-blocks in the way of the abolitionist* 
the philainthropist, as the organs of 
influence and opinion are swift to do. 
It is for us to confide in the beneficent 
Supreme Power, and not to rely on our 
money, and on the state because it is 
the guard of money. At this moment, 
the terror of old people and of vicious 
people, is lest the Union of these States 
be destroyed : as if the Union had any 
other real basis than the good pleasure of 
a majority of the citizens to be united. 
But the wise and just man w\ll always 
feel that he stands on his own feet ; that 
he imparts strength to the state, not re- 
ceives security from it; and that if all 
went down, he and such as he would 
quite easily combine in a new and better 
constitution. Every great and memorable 
community has consisted of formidable 
individuals, each of whom, like the Roman 
or the Spartan, lent his own spirit to the 
state and made it great. Yet only by 
the supernatural is a man strong : nothing 
is so weak as an egotist. Nothing is 
mightier than we, when we are vehicles 
of a truth, before which the state and the 
individual are alike ephemeral. 

Gentlemen, the development of our 
American internal resources, the exten- 
sion to the utmost of the commercial 
system, and the appearance of new moral 
causes which are to modify the state, are 
giving an aspect of greatness to the 
j Future, which the imagination fears to 
open. One thing is plain for all men of 
common sense and common conscience, 
that here, here in America, is the home 
of man. After all the deductions which 
are to be made for our pitiful politics, 
which stake every gravest national ques- 
tion on the silly die, whether James or 
whether Jonathan shall sit in the chair 
and hold the purse ; after all the deduc- 
tion is made for our frivolities and insani- 
ties, there still remains an organic sim' 
plicity and liberty, which, when it loses 
its balance, redresses itself presently, 
which offers opportunity to the human 
mind not known in any other region. 

It is true, the public mind wants self- 
respect. We are full of vanity, of which 
the most signal proof is our sensitiveness 
to foreign and especially English censure. 
One cause of this is our immense reading, 
and that reading chiefly confined to the 
productions of the English press. It is 
also true, that, to imaginative persons in 
this country, there is somewhat bare and 
bald ia gur ahgrt bistgry, and unseUtod 



MISCSLLAmSS. 


4 «^ 

wilderness. They ask, who would live in 
a new country, that can live in an old ? 
and it is not strange that our youths and 
maidens should bum to see the pictures- 
que extremes of an antiquated country. 
But it is one thing to visit the pyramids 
and another to wish to live there. Would 
they like tithes to the clergy, and sevenths 
to the government, and horse-guards, and 
licensed press, and grief when a child is 
born, and threatening, starved weavers, 
and a pauperism now constituting one 
thirteenth of the population ? Instead of 
the open future expanding here before 
the eye of every boy to vastness, would 
they like the closing in of the future to a 
narrow slit of sky, and that fast contract- 
ing to be no futiye ? One thing, for in- 
stance, the beauties of aristocracy, we 
commend to the study of the travelling 
American. The English, the most con- 
servative people this side of India, are 
not sensible of the restraint, but an Ame- 
rican would seriously resent it. The 
aristocracy, incorporated by law and edu- 
cation, degrades life for the unprivileged 
classes. It is a questionable compensa- 
tion to the embittered feeling of a proud 
commoner, the reflection that a fop, who, 
by the magic of title, paralyzes his arm, 
and plucks from him half the graces and 
rights of a man, is himself also an aspi- 
rant excluded with the same ruthlessness 
from higher circles, since there is no end 
to the wheels within wheels of this spiral 
heaven. Something may be pardoned to 
the spirit of loyalty when it becomes fan- 
tastic ; and something to the imagination, 
for the baldest life is symbolic. Philip II. 
of Spain rated his ambassador for neglect- 
ing serious affairs in Italy, whilst he de- 
bated some point of honour with the 
French ambassador; You have left a 
business of importance for a ceremony.” 
The ambassador replied ; ” Your Majesty’s 
self is but a ceremony." In the East, 
where the religious sentiment comes in to 


the support of the aristocracy, and In the 
Romish Church also, there is a grain of 
sweetness in the tyranny ; but in England, 
the fact seems to me intolerable, what is 
commonly affirmed, that such is the 
transcendent honour accorded to wealth 
I and birth, that no man of letters, be his 
eminence what it may, is received into 
the best society, except as a lion and a 
show. The English have many virtues, 
many advantages, and the proudest his- 
tory of the world ; but they need all, and 
more than all the resources of the past to 
indemnify a heroic gentleman in that 
country for the mortifications prepared 
for him by the system of society, and 
which seem to impose the alternative to 
resist or to avoid it. That there are miti- 
gations and practical alleviations to this 
rigour is not an excuse for the . rule. 
Commanding worth, and personal power, 
must sit crowned in all companies, nor 
will extraordinary persons bo slighted or 
affronted in any company of civilized 
men. But the system is an invasion of 
the sentiment of justice and the native 
rights of men, which, however decorated, 
must lessen the value of English citizen- 
ship. It is for Englishmen to consider, 
not for us ; we only say, let us live in 
America, too thankful for our want of 
feudal institutions. Our houses and towns 
are like mosses and lichens, so slight and 
new; but youth is a fault of which we 
shall daily mend. This land, too, is as 
old as the Flood, and wants no ornament 
or privilege which nature could bestow. 
Here stars, here woods, here hills, her© 
animals, here men abound, and the vast 
tendencies concur of a new order. If only 
the men are employed in conspiring with 
the designs of the Spirit who led us hither, 
and is leading us still, we shall quickly 
enough advance out of all hearing of 
other^s censures, out of all regrets of our 
own, into a new and more excellent social 
state than history has recorded. 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 


* fell ia with a humorist, on my 
travels, who had in his chamber a cast 
of the Rondanini Medusa, and who 
assured me that the name which that 
fine work of art bore in the catalogues 
was a misnomer, as he was convinced 
that the sculptor who carved it intended 
it for Memory, the mother of the Muses. 
In the conversation that followed, my 
new friend made some extraordinary 
confessions. “ Do you not see,” ha 
said, ” the penalty of learnins, and that 
each of these scholars whom you have 

met at S , though he were to bo the 

last man, would, like the executioner in 
Hood’s poem, guillotine the last but 
one? ” He added many lively remarks, 
hut his evident earnestness engaged 
my attention, and, in the weeks that 
Allowed, we became better acquainted. 
He had good abilities, a genial temper, 
and no vices ; but he had one defect, 
— he could not speak in the tone of the 
people. There was some paralysis on 
his will, such that, when he met men 
on common terms, he spoke weakly, 
and from the point, like a flighty girl. 
His consciousness of the fault made it 
worse. He envied every drover and 
lumberman in the tavern their manly 
speech. He coveted Mirabeau's don j 
terrible de la familiariU, believing that | 
he whose sympathy goes lowest is the | 
man from whom kings have the most to I 
fear. For himself, he declared that he 
could not get enough alone to write a 
letter to a friend. He left the city ; he 
hid himself in pastures. The solitary 
river was not solitary enough ; the sun 
and moon put him out. When he 
bought a house, the first thing he did 
was to plant trees. He could not 
enough conceal himself. Set a hedge 
here ; set oaks there — trees behind 
trees ; above all, set evergreens, for 
they will keep a secret all the year 
round. The most agreeable compliment 
you could pay him was, to imply that 
you had not observed him io a house 


or a street where you had met him, 
Whilst he suffered at being seen where 
he was, he consoled himself with the 
delicious thought of the inconceivable 
number of places where he was not. 
All he wished of his tailor was to pro- 
vide that sober mean of colour and cut 
which would never detain the eye for a 
moment. He went to Vienna, to 
Smyrna, to London. In all the variety 
of costumes, a carnival, a kaleidoscope 
of clothes, to his horror he could never 
discover a man in the street who wore 
anything like his own dress. He would 
have given his soul for the ring of 
Gyges. His dismay at his visibility had 
blunted the fears of mortality. ” Do 
you think,” he said, ” I am in such great 
terror of being shot — I, who am only 
waiting to shuffle off my corporeai 
jacket, to slip away into the back stars, 
and put diameters of the solar system 
and sidereal orbits between me and all 
souls — there to wear out ages in soli- 
tude, and forget memory itself, if it be 
possible ? ” He had a remorse running 
to despair, of his social gaucheries^ and 
walked miles and miles to get the 
twitchings out of his face, the starts and 
shrugs out of his arms and shoulders, 
God may forgive sins, he said, but 
awkwardness has no forgiveness ih 
heaven or earth. He admired in Newton, 
not so much his theory of the moon, as 
his letter to Collins, in which he for- 
bade him to insert his name with the 
solution of the problem in the “ Philo- 
sophical Transactions ” : “It would 
perhaps increase my acquaintance, the 
thing which I chiefly study to decline.” 

These conversations led me somewhat 
later to the knowledge of similar cases, 
and to the discovery tliat they are not 
of very infrequent occurrence. Few 
substances are found pure in nature. 
Those constitutions which can bear in 
open day the rough dealing of the world 
must be of that mean and average 
structure — such as iron and salt, at* 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


406 

mospherlc air and water; But there 
are metals, like potassium and sodium, 
which, to be kept pure, must be kept 
under naphtha. Such are the talents 
determined on some specialty, which 
a culminating civilization fosters in the 
heart of great cities and in royal cham- 
bers. Nature protects her own work. 
To the culture of the world, an Archi- 
medes, a Newton is indispensable ; so 
she guards them by a certain aridity. 
If these had been good fellows, fond of 
dancing, port and clubs, we should have 
had no “ Theory of the Sphere,** and 
no “ Principia." They had that neces- 
sity of isolation which genius feels. 
Each must stand on his glass tripod, if 
he would keep his electricity. Even 
Swedenborg, whose theory of the uni- 
verse is based on affection, and who 
reprobates to weariness the danger and 
vice of pure intellect, is constrained to 
to make an extraordinary exception : 
“ There are also angels who do not live 
consociated, but separate, house and 
house ; these dwell in the midst of 
heaven, because they are the best of 
angels.” 

We have known many fine geniuses | 
with that imperfection that they cannot j 
do anything useful, not so much as | 
write one clean sentence. ’Tis worse, 
and tragic, that no man is fit for society j 
who has fine traits. At a distancew he 
is admired ; but bring him hand to 
hand, he is a cripple. One protects 
himself by solitude, and one by courtesy, 
and one by an acid, worldly manner — 
each conceding how he can the thinness 
of his skin and his incapacity for strict 
association. But there is no remedy 
that can reach the heart of the disease, 
bu# either habits of self-reliance that 
should go in practice to making the 
man independent of the human race, or 
else a religion of love. Now he hardly 
seems entitled to marry; for how can 
he protect a woman who cannot protect 
himself ? 

We pray to be conventional. But the 
wary Heaven takes care you shall not 
be, if there is anything good in you. 
Dante was very bad company and was 
never invited to dinner. Michael Angelo 
had a sad, sour time of it. The mi- 
nisters of beauty are rarely beautiful in 
coaches and spoons. Columbus dis- 
covered no isle or key so lonely as 
himself. Yet each of these potentates 
saw well the reason of his exclusion. 
Solitary was be ? Why, yes : bui bis 


society was limited only by the amount 
of brain Nature appropriated in that 
age to carry on the government of the 
world. ‘‘If I stay,” said Dante, when 
there was question of going to Rome, 
” who will go ? and if I go, who will 
stay ? ” 

But the necessity of solitude is deeper 
than we have said, and is organic. I 
have seen many a philosopher whose 
world is large enough for only one 
person. He affects to bo a good com- 
panion ; but we are still surprising his 
secret, that he means and needs to 
impose his system on all the rest. The 
determination of each is from all the 
others, like that of each tree up into 
free space. ’Tis no wonder, when each 
has his whole head, our societies should 
be so small. Like President Tyler, our 
party falls from us every day, and we 
must ride in a sulky at last. Dear 
heart! take it sadly home to thee — 
there is no co-operation. We begin 
with friendships, and all our youth is a 
reconnoitring and recruiting of the holy 
fraternity they shall combine for the 
salvation of men. But so the remoter 
stars seem a nebula of united light ; 
yet there is no group which a telescope 
will not resolve, and the dearest friends 
are separated by impassable gulfs. The 
co-operation is involuntary, and is put 
upon us by the Genius of Life, who 
reserves this as a part of his prerogative. 
’Tis fine for us to talk, we sit and muse, 
and are serene and complete ; but the 
moment we meet with anybody, each 
becomes a fraction. 

Though the stuff of tragedy and of 
romances is in a moral union of two 
superior persons, whose confidence in 
each other for long years, out of sight, 
and in sight, and against all appearances, 
is at last justified by victorious proof of 
probity to gods and men, causing joyful 
emotions, tears and glory — though 
there be for heroes this moral union. 
yet, they, too, are as far off as ever from 
an intellectual union, and the moral 
union is for comparatively low and 
external purposes, like the co-operation 
of a ship’s company or of a fire-club. 
But how insular and pathetically soli- 
tary are all the people we know I Nor 
dare they tell what they think of each 
other, when they meet in the Etreet. 
We have a fine right, to be sure, to taunt 
men of the world with superficial and 
treacherous courtesies 1 
Such is tbs tragig necessity wbicb 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 




itrict science finds underneath our 
domestic and neighbourly life, irresistibly 
driving each adult soul as with whips 
into the desert, and making our warm 
covenants sentimental and momentary. 
We must infer that the ends of thought 
were peremptory, if they were to be 
secured at such ruinous cost. They are 
deeper than can be told, and belong to 
the immensities and eternities. They 
reach down to that depth where society 
itself originates and disappears — where 
the question is Which is first, man or 
men ? — where the individual is lost in 
his source. 

But this banishment to the rocks and 
echoes no metaphysics can make right 
or tolerable. This result is so against 
nature, such a half-view, that it must j 
be corrected by a common sense and j 
experience. "A man is born by the 
Bide of his father, and there he remains.” 
A man must be clothed with society, or 
wo shall feel a certain bareness and 
poverty, as of a displaced and unfur- 
nished member. He is to be dressed in 
arts and institutions, as well as in body 
garments. Now and then a man exqui- 
sitely made can live alone, and must; 
but coop up most men, and you undo 
them. ‘‘The king lived and ate in his 
hall with men, and understood men,” 
said Selden. When a young barrister 
.said to the late Mr. Mason, ” I keep my 
chamber to read law,” — ” Read law 1 ” re- 
plied the veteran, ” 'tis in the court-room 
you must read law.” Nor is the rule 
otherwise for literature. If you would 
learn to write, 'tis in the street you must 
learn it. Both for the vehicle and for the 
aims of fine arts, you must frequent the 
public square. The people, and not the 
college, is the writer’s home. A scholar 
is a candle which the love and desire of 
all men will light. Never his lands or his 
rents, but the power to charm the dis- 
guised soul that sits veiled under this 
bearded and that rosy visage is his rent 
and ration. His products are as needful 
as those of the baker or the weaver. 
Society cannot do without cultivated men. 
As soon as the first wants are satisfied, 
the higher wants become imperative. 

’Tis hard to mesmerize ourselves, to 
whip our own top; but through sympathy 
we are capable of energy and endurance. 
Concert fires people to a certain fury of 
performance they can rarely reach alone. 
Here is the use of society: it is so easy 
with the great to be great; so easy to 
pome up to an existing standard ; m easy 


as it is to the lover to swim to his maiden 
through waves so grim before. The bene- 
fits of affection are immense ; and the one 
event which never loses its romance is 
the encounter with superior persons on 
terms allowing the happiest intercourse. 

It by no means follows that we are not 
fit for society, because soiries sire tedious 
and because the soirie finds us tedious. A 
backwoodsman, who had been sent to tha 
university, told me that, when he heard tha 
best bred young men at the law school talk 
together, he reckoned himself a boor ; but 
whenever he caught them apart, and had 
one to himself alone, then they were tha 
boors, and he the better man. And if we 
recall the rare hours when we encountered 
the best persons, we thf 'a found ourselves 
and then first society seemed to exist. 
That was society, though in the transom 
of a brig, or on the Florida Keys. 

A cold, sluggish blood thinks it has not 
facts enough to the purpose, and must 
decline its turn in the conversation. But 
they who speak have no more — have less. 
'Tis not new facts that avail, but the heat 
to dissolve everybody’s facts. Heat puts 
you in right relation with magazines of 
facts. The capital defect of cold, arid 
natures is the want of animal spirits. 
They seem a power incredible, as if God 
should raise the dead. The recluse wit- 
nesses what others perform by their aid, 
with a kind of fear. It is as much out of 
his possibility as the prowess of Cceur-de- 
Lion or an Irishman’s day’s-work on the 
railroad. ’Tis said the present and the 
t future are always rivals. Animal spirits 
constitute the power of the present, and 
their feats are like the structure of a py- 
ramid, Their result is a lord, a general, 
or a boon companion. Before these, 
what a base mendicant is Memory with 
his leathern badge I But this genial heat 
is latent in all constitutions, and is dis- 
engaged only by the friction of society. 
As Bacon said of manners, “To obtain 
them, it only needs not to despise them,” 
so we say of animal spirits, that they are 
the spontaneous product of health and of 
a social habit. “ For behaviour, men 
learn it, as they take diseases, one of 
another.” 

But the people are to be taken in very 
small doses. If solitude is proud, so is 
society vulgar. In society, high advan- 
tages are set down to the individual as 
disqualifications. We sink as easily as 
we rise, through sympathy. So many men 
whom I know are degraded by their sym- 
pathies. their native aims being high 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE, 


408 

enough, but their relation all too tender to 
the gross people about them. Men can- 
not afford to live together on theit merits, 
and they adjust . themselves by their de- 
merits— by their love of gossip, or by 
sheer tolerance and animal good-nature. 
They untune and dissipate the brave as- 
pirant 

The remedy is, to reinforce each of 
these moods from the other. Conver- 
sation will not corrupt us, if we come to 
the assembly in our own garb and speech, 
and with the energy of health to select 
what is ours and reject what is not. So- 
ciety we must have ; but let it be society, 
aud not exchanging news, or eating from 
the same dish. Is it society to sit in one 
of your chairs ? I cannot go to the houses 
of my nearest relatives, because I do not 
wish to be alone. Society exists by che- 
mical affinity, and not otherwise. 

Put any company of people together 
with freedom for conversation, and a 
rapid self-distribution takes place, into 
eets and pairs. The best are accused of 
exclusiveness. It would be more true to 
say, they separate as oil from water, as 
children from old people, without love or 
hatred in the matter, each seeking his like ; 
and any interference with the affinities 
would produce constraint and suffocation. 
All conversation is a magnetic experi- 
ment. I know that my friend can talk 
eloquently ; you know that he cannot ar- 
ticulate a sentence ; we have seen him in 
different company. Assort your party, or 
invite none. Put Stubbs and Coleridge, 
Quintilian and Aunt Miriam, into pairs, 
and you make them ail wretched, 'Tis an 


extempore Sing-Sing built in a (arlouft 
Leave them to seek their own mates, and 
they will be as merry as sparrows. 

A higher civility will re-establish in ouf 
customs a certain reverence which we 
have lost. What to do with these brisk 
young men who break through all fences, 
and make themselves at home in every 
house? I 6nd out in an instant if my 
companion does not want me, and ropes 
cannot hold me when my welcome in 
gone. One would think that the affinities 
would proiT'uncc themselves with a surer 
reciprocity 

Here again, as so often, Nature delights 
to put us between extreme antagonisms, 
and our safety is in the skill with which 
we keep the diagonal line. Solitude is 
impracticable, and society fatal. We must 
keep our head in the one and our hands 
in the other. The conditions are met, if 
we keep our independence, yet do not lose 
our sympathy. These wonderful horses 
need to be driven by fine hands. Wa 
require such a solitude as shall hold us to 
its revelations when we are in the street 
and in palaces ; for most men are cowed 
in society, and say good things to you in 
private, but will not stand to them in 
public. But let us not be the victims of 
words. Society and solitude are deceptive 
names. It is not the circumstance of see- 
ing more or fewer people, but the readiness 
of sympathy, that imports; and a sound 
mind will derive its principles from in- 
sight, with ever a purer ascent to the 
sufficient and absolute right, and will ac- 
cept society as the natural element ia 
which they are to be applied. 


CIVILIZATION. 


A CERTAIN degree of progress from the 
rudest state in which man is found— a 
dweller in caves, or on trees, like an ape 
— a cannibal, and eater of pounded snails, 
worms, and offal — a certain degree of pro- 
gress from this extreme is called Civili- 
zation. It is a vague, complex name, of 
many degrees. Nobody has attempted a 
definition. Mr. Guizot, writing a book on 
the subject, does not, It implies the evo- 
lution of a highly organized man, brought 
to supreme delicacy of sentiment, as in 
practical power, religion, liberty, sense of 
honor, and taste. In the hesitation to 
define what it is, we usually suggest it. by 
negations. A nation that has no clothing, 
no iron, no alphabet, no marriage, no arts 


! of peace, no abstract thought, we call bar- 
I barous. And after many arts are invented 
lor imported, as among the Turks and 
Moorish nations, it is often a little com- 
plaisant to call them civilized. 

Each nation ^ows after its own genius, 
and has a civilization of its own. The 
Chinese and Japanese, though each com- 
plete in his way, is different from the man 
of Madrid or the man of New York. The 
term imports a mysterious progress. In 
the brutes is none ; and in mankind to- 
day the savage tribes are gradually ex- 
tinguished rather than civilized. The 
Indians of this country have not learned 
the white man’s work v and in Africa, the 
negro of to>day is ths negro of Herodotus, 



CIVILIZATION, 


In other races the growth is not arrested ; 
but the like progress that is made by a 
boy “ when he cuts his eye-teeth,” as we 
say — childish illusions passing daily away, 
and he seeing things really and compre- 
hensively — is made by tribes. It is the 
learning the secret of cumulative power, of 
advancing on one’s self. It implies a fa- 
cility of association, power to compare, 
tlie ceasing from fixed ideas. The Indian 
is gloomy and distressed when urged to 
depart from his habits and traditions. He 
is overpowered by the gaze of the white, 
and his eye sinks. The occasion of one 
of these starts of growth is always some 
novelty that astounds the mind, and pro- 
yokes it to dare to change. Thus there 
is a Cadmus, a Pytheas, a Manco Capac 
at tha beginning of each improvement — 
some superior foreigner importing new 
and wonderful arts, and teaching them. 
Of course, he must not know too much, 
but must have the sympathy, language, 
and gods of those he would inform. But 
chiefly the sea-shore has been the point 
of departure to knowledge, as to com- 
merce. The most advanced nations are 
always those who navigate the most. The 
power which the sea requires in the sailor 
makes a man of him very fast, and the 
change of shores and population clears 
his head of much nonsense of his wigwam. 

Where shall we begin or end the list of 
those feats of liberty and wit, each of 
which feats made an epoch of history ? 
Thus, the effect of a framed or stone 
house is immense on the tranquillity, 
power, and refinement of the builder, A 
man in a cave or in a camp, a nomad, will 
die with no more estate than the wolf or 
the horse leaves. But so simple a labour 
as a house being achieved, his chief 
enemies are kept at bay. He is safe from 
the teeth of wild animals, from frost, sun- 
stroke, and weather; and fine faculties 
begin to yield their fine harvest. Inven- 
tion and art are born, manners and social 
beauty and delight. 'Tis wonderful how 
soon a piano gets into a log-hut on the 
frontier. You would think they found it 
under a pine stump. With it comes a 
Latin grammar — and one of those tow- , 
head boys has written a hymn on Sunday. 
Now let colleges, now let senates take 
heed I for here is one who, opening these 
fine tastes on the basis of the pioneer’s 
iron constitution, will gather all their 
laurels in his strong hands. 

When the Indian trail gets widened, 

S faded, and bridged to a good road, there 
\ a benefactor, there is a missionary! s i 


409 

pacificator, a wealth bringer, a maker of 
markets, a vent for industry. Another step 
in civility is the change from war, hunang, 
and pasturage to agriculture. Our Scandi« 
navian forefathers have left us a significant 
legend to convey their sense of the im- 
portance of this step. ‘‘There was once a 
giantess who had a daughter, and tha 
child saw a husbandman ploughing in the 
field. Then she ran and picked him up 
with her finger and thumb, and put him 
and his plough and his oxen into her 
apron, and carried them to her mother, 
and said, ‘ Mother, what sort of a beetle 
is this that I found wriggling in the sand ?' 
But the mother said, ‘ Put it away, my 
child ; we must begone out of this land, 
for these people will dwell in it.’ ” An- 
other success is the post-office, with its 
educating energy augmented by cheap- 
ness and guarded by a certain religious 
sentiment in mankind ; so that the power 
of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to 
guard a letter, as it flies over sea, over 
land, and comes to its address as if a bat- 
talion of artillery brought it, I look upon 
as a fine metre of civilization. 

The division of labour, the multiplica- 
tion of the arts of peace, which is nothing 
but a large allowance to each man to 
choose his work according to his faculty 
— to live by his better hand — fills the State 
with useful and happy labourers; and 
they, creating demand by the very temp- 
tation of their productions, are rapidly 
and surely rewarded by good sale: and 
what a police and ten commandments their 
work thus becomes. So true is Dr. John- 
son’s remark that “ men are seldom more 
innocently employed than when they are 
making money.” 

The skilful combinations of civil govern- 
ment, though they usually follow natural 
leadings, as the lines of race, language, 
religion, and territory, yet require wisdom 
and conduct in the rulers, and in their 
result delight the imagination. “ We sea 
insurmountable multitudes obeying, in op- 
position to their strongest passioni, tha 
restraints of a power which they scarcely 
perceive, and the crimes of a single indi- 
vidual marked and punished at the dis- 
tance of half the earth.” * 

Right position of woman in the State 
is another index. Poverty and industry 
with a healthy mind read very easily the 
laws of humanity, and love them : place 
the sexes in right relations of mutual 
respect, and a severe morality givei that 

• Pr, Thpmas Brown. 



410 SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


essential charm to woman which edu- 
cates all that is delicate, poetic, and self- 
sacrificing, breeds courtesy and learning, 
conversation and wit, in her rough mate ; 
so that I have thought a sufficient measure 
of civilization is the influence of good 
women. 

Another measure of culture is the diffu- 
sion of knowledge overrunning all the old 
barriers of caste, and, by the cheap press, 
bringing the university to every poor man’s 
door in the newsboy’s basket. Scraps of 
science, of thought, of poetry are in the 
coarsest sheet, so that in every house we 
hesitate to burn a newspaper until we have 
looked it through. 

The ship, in its latest complete equip- 
ment, is an abridgment and compend of 
a nation’s arts: the ship steered by com- 
pass and chart — longitude reckoned by 
lunar observation and by chronometer — 
driven by steam ; and in wildest sea- 
mountains, at vast distances from home, 

•* The pulses of her iron heart 
Go beating through the storm,*' 

No use can lessen the wonder of this 
control, by so weak a creature, of forces 
so prodigious. I remember I watched, 
in crossing the sea, the beautiful skill 
whereby the engine, in its constant work- 
ing, was made to produce two hundred 
gallons of fresh water out of salt water, 
every hour — thereby supplying all the 
ship’s want. 

The skill that pervades complex de- 
tails ; the man that maintains himself; 
the chimney taught to burn its own 
smoke ; the farm made to produce all that 
is consumed on it ; the very prison com- 
pelled to maintain itself and yield a re- 
venue ; and, better still, made a reform 
school, and a manufactory of honest men 
out of rogues, as the steamer made fresh 
water out of salt— all these are examples 
of that tendency to combine antagonisms, 
and utilize evil, which is the index of high 
civilization. 

Civilization is the result of highly com- 
plex organization. In the snake, all the 
organs are sheathed : no hands, no feet, 
no fins, no wings. In bird and beast, the 
organs are released, and begin to play. In 
man, they are all unbound, and full of 
loyful action. With this unswaddling he 
receives the absolute illumination we call 
Reason, and thereby true liberty. 

Climate has much to do with this melio- 
ration. The highest civility has never 
loved the hot zones. Wherever snow 
IsJls, there if ueually civil freedvm, Where 


the banana grows, the animal system if 
indolent and pampered at the cost of 
higher qualities: the man is sensual and 
cruel. But this scale is not invej-iable, 
High degrees of moral sentiment control 
the unfavorable influences of climate ; 
and some of our grandest examples of 
men and of races come from the equa- 
torial regions — as the genius of Egypt, of 
India and of Arabia. 

These feats are measures or traits of 
civility; and temperate climate is an 
important influence, though not quite 
indispensable, for there have been learn- 
ing, philosophy and art in Iceland, and in 
the tropics. But one condition is essen- 
tial to the social education of man, namely, 
morality. There can be no high civility 
without a deep morality, though it may 
not always call itself by that name, but 
sometimes the point of honour, as in the 
institution of chivalry; or patriotism, as 
in the Spartan and Roman republics ; or 
the enthusiasm of some religious sect 
which imputes its virtue to its dogma ; 
or the cabalism, or esprit de corps, of a 
masonic or other association of friends. 

The evolution of a highly-destined 
society must be moral ; it must run in 
the grooves of the celestial wheels. It 
must be catholic in aims. What is moral? 
It is the respecting in action catholic or 
universal ends. Hear the definition which 
Kant gives of moral conduct : " Act always 
so that the immediate motive of thy will 
may become a universal rule for all in- 
telligent beings.” 

Civilization depends on morality. Every- 
thing good in man leans on what is higher. 
This rule holds in small as in great. Thus, 

I all our strength and success in the work 
I of our hands depend on our borrowing the 
aid of the elements. You have seen a 
carpenter on a ladder with a broad-axe 
chopping rpwards chips from a beam. 
How awkward ! at what disadvantage he 
works ! But see him on the ground, dress- 
ing his timber under him. Now, not his 
feeble muscles, but the force of gravity 
brings down the axe ; that is to say, the 
planet itself splits his stick. The farmer 
had mii':h ill-temper, laziness, and shirk- 
ing to endure from his hand-sawyers, until 
one day he bethought him to put his saw- 
mill on the edge of a waterfall; and the 
river never tires of turning his wheel : the 
river is good-natured, and never hints an 
objection. 

We had letters to send : couriers could 
not go fast enough, nor far enough; broke 
tU^ir wagons, foundered their horses ; bad 



CIVlU^ATlON. 


foads in spring, snowdrifts in winter, heats 
In summer ; could not get the horses out 
of a walk. But we found out that the air 
and earth were full of Electricity; and 
always going our way — ^jiist the way we 
wanted to send. Would he take a message ? 
Just as lief as not; had nothing else to 
do ; would carry it in no time. Only one 
doubt occurred, one staggering objection 
—he had no carpet-bag, no visible pockets, 
no hands, not so much as a mouth, to 
carry a letter. But, after much thought 
and many experiments, we managed to 
meet the conditions, and to fold up the 
letter in such invisible compact form as 
he could carry in those invisible pockets 
of his, never, wrought by needle and thread 
— and it went like a charm. 

I admire still more than the saw-mill 
the skill which, on the sea-shore, makes 
the tides drive the wheels and grind corn, 
and which thus engages the assistance of 
the moon, like a hired hand, to grind, and 
wind, and pump, and saw, and split stone, 
and roll iron. 

Now that is the wisdom of a man, in 
every instance of his labour, to hitch his 
wagon to a star, and see his chore done 
by the gods themselves. That is the way 
vve are strong, by borrowing the might of 
the elements. The forces of steam, gravity, 
galvanism, light, magnets, wind, fire servo 
vs day by day, and cost us nothing. 

Our astronomy is full of examples of 
calling in the aid of these magnificent 
helpers. Thus, on a planet so small as 
Durs, the want of an adequate base for 
astronomical measurements is early felt, 
as, for example, in detecting the parallax 
of a star. But the astronomer, having by 
an observation fixed the place of a star, by 
so simple an expedient as waiting six 
months, and then repeating his observa- 
tion, contrived to put the diameter of the 
earth's orbit, say two hundred millions of 
miles, between his first observation and 
his second, and this line afforded him a 
respectable base for his triangle. 

All our arts aim to win this vantage. 
We cannot bring the heavenly powers to 
us, but, if wo will only choose our jobs 
in directions in which they travel, they 
will undertake them with the greatest 
pleasure. It is a peremptory rule with 
them, that they never go out of their road. 
We are dapper little busybodies, and run 
this way and that way superserviceably ; 
but they swerve never from their fore- 
ordained paths — neither the sun, nor the 
moon, nor a bubble of air, nor a mote of 
duat. 


413 

And as our handiworks bdrrOw tha 

elements, so all our social and political 
action leans on principles. To accoraplisti 
anything excellent, the will must work for 
catholic and universal ends. A puny crea- 
ture walled in on every side, as Daniel 
wrote — 

“ Unless above himself he can 

Brect himself, how poor a thing is man !*• 

but when hii will leans on a principle, 
when ho is the vi*hicle of ideas, he 
i borrows their omnipotence, Gibraltar 
may be strong, but ideas are impregnable, 
and bestow on the hero their invincibility. 
“ It was a great instruction,” said a saint 
in Cromwell's war, ” that the best courage! 
are but beams of the Almighty.” Hitch 
your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in 
paltry works which serve our pot and bag 
alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god 
will help. We shall find all their teams 
going the other way — Charles’s Wain, 
Great Bear, Orion, Leo, Hercules : every 
god will leave us. Work rather for those 
interests which the divinities honour and 
I promote— justice, love, freedom, know- 
ledge, utility. 

If we can thus ride in Olympian chariots 
by putting our works in the path of the 
celestial circuits, we can harness also evil 
agents, tho powers of darkness, and force 
them to serve against their will the ends 
of wisdom and virtue. Thus, a wise govern- 
ment puts fines and penalties on pleasant 
vices. What a benefit would the American 
government, not yet relieved of its ex- 
treme need, render to itself, and to every 
city, village, and hamlet in the States, if 
it would tax whiskey and rum almost to 
the point of prohibition ! Was it Bonaparte 
who said that he found vices very good 
patriots ? He got five millions from the 
love of brandy, and he should be glad to 
know which of the virtues would pay him 
as much.” Tobacco and opium have broad 
backs, and will cheerfully carry the load 
of armies, if you choose to make them pay 
high for such joy as they give and sucb 
harm as they dc. 

These are traits, and measures, and 
modes; and the true test of civilization 
is, not the census, nor the size of cities, 
nor the crops — no, but the kind of man 
the country turns out. I see the vast ad- 
vantages of this country, spanning tha 
breadth of the temperate zone. I see the 
immense material prosperity — towns on 
towns, states on states, and wealth piled 
in the massive architecture of cities ; Cali* 
lomia (juartz- mountains dumped down 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


4U 

New York to be repiled architecturally 
along-shore from Canada to Cuba, and 
thence westward to California again. But 
\t is not New York streets built by the 
confluence of workmen and wealth of all 
nations, though stretching out towards 
Philadelphia until they touch it, and north- 
ward until they touch New Haven, Hart- 
ford, Springfield, Worcester and Boston 
— not these that make the real estimation. 

when I look over this constellation 
Csf cities which animate and illustrate the 
land, and see how little the government 
has to do with their daily life, how self- 
helped and self-directed all families are — 
knots of men in purely natural societies, 
societies of trade, of kindred blood, of 
habitual hospitality, house and house, man 
acting on man by weight of opinion, of 
longer or better-directed industry, the re- 
fining influence of women, the invitation 
which experience and permanent causes 
open to youth and labour — when 1 see how 
much each virtuous and gifted person, 
whom all men consider, lives affectionately 
with scores of excellent people who are 
not known far from home, and perhaps 
with great reason reckons these people 
his superiors in virtue, and in the sym- 
metry and force of their qualities, I see 
what cubic values America has, and in 
these a better certificate of civilization 
than great cities of enormous wealth. 

In strictness, the vital refinements are 
the moral and intellectual steps. The 
appearance of the Hebrew Moses, of the 
Indian Buddh — in Greece, of the Seven 
Wise Masters, of the acute and upright 
Socrates, and of the Stoic Zeno— in Judaea, 
the advent of Jesus — and in modern Chris- 
tendom, of the realists Huss, Savonarola 
and Luther, are causal facts which carry 
forward races to new convictions, and 
elevate the rule of life. In the presence 
of these agencies, it is frivolous to insist 
on the invention of printing or gunpowder, 


of steam-power or gas-light, percussion- 
caps and rubber-shoes, which are toys 
thrown off from that security, freedom 
and exhilaration which a healthy morality 
creates in society. These arts add a 
comfort and smoothness to house and 
street life ; but a purer morality, which 
kindles genius, civilizes civilization, casts 
backward all that we held sacred into the 
profane, as the flame of oil throws a 
shadow when shined upon by the flame 
of the Bude-light. ^ot the less the 
popular measures of progress will ever 
be the arts and the laws. 

But if there be a country which cannot 
stand any one of these tests — a country 
where knowledge cannot be diffused with- 
out perils of mob-law and statute-law, 
where speech is not free — where the post- 
office is violated, mail-bags opened, and 
letters tampered with— where public debts 
and private debts outside of the State are 
repudiated — where liberty is attacked ii) 
the primary institution of social life — 
where the position of the white woman is 
injuriously affected by the outlawry of the 
black woman — where the arts, such as 
they have, are all imported, having no 
indigenous life — where the labourer is not 
secured in the earnings of his own hands 
— where suffrage is not free or equal — ■ 
that country is, in all these respects, 
not civil, but barbarous, and no advan> 
tages of soil, climate, or coast can resist 
these suicidal mischiefs. 

Morality and all the incidents of mo- 
rality are essential ; as, justice to the 
citizen, and personal liberty. Montesquieu 
says: “ Countries are well cultivated, not 
as they are fertile, but as they are free ; ” 
and the remark holds not less but more 
true of the culture of men, than of the 
tillage of land. And the highest proof of 
civility is, that the whole public action of 
the State is directed on securing tho 
greatest good of the greatest number. 


ART. 


All departments of life at the present 
day — Trade, Politics, Letters, Science, or 
Religion — seem to feel, and to labour to 
express, the identity of their law. They 
are rays of one sun ; they translate each 
into a new language the sense of the 
other. They are sublime when seen as 
emanations of a Necessity contradistin- 
guished from the vulgar Fate, by being 
instant and alive, and dissolving man, as 


well as his works, in its flowing beneficence 
This influence is conspicuously visible in 
the princijfles and history of Art. 

On one side in primary communication 
with absolute truth through thought and 
instinct, the human mind on tho other 
side tends, by an equal necessity, to the 
publication and embodiment of its thought, 
modified and dwarfed by the impurity and 
untruth which, in all our experience, in- 



ART. 4t3 


Jure the individuality through which it 
passes. The child not only suffers, but 
cries; not only hungers, but eats. The 
man not only thinks, but speaks and acts. 
Every thought that arises in the mind, in 
its rising aims to pass out of the mind 
into act ; just as every plant, in the moment 
of germination, struggles up to light. 
Thought is the seed of action ; but action 
is as much its second form as thought is 
its first. It rises in thought, to the end 
that it may be uttered and acted. The 
more profound the thought, the more bur- 
densome. Always in proportion to the 
depth of its sense does it knock impor- 
tunately at the gates of the soul, to be 
spoken, to be done. What is in, will out. 
It struggles to the birth. Speech is a great 
pleasure, and action a great pleasure ; 
they cannot be forborne. 

The utterance of thought and emotion ia 
speech and action may be conscious or 
unconscious. The sucking child is an 
unconscious actor. The man in an ec- 
stacy of fear or anger is an unconscious 
actor. A large part of our habitual actions 
are unconsciously done, and most of our 
necessary words are unconsciously said. 

The conscious utterance of thought, by 
speech or action, to any end, is Art. From 
the first imitative babble of a child to 
the despotism of eloquence, from his first 
pile of toys or chip bridge to the masonry 
of Minot Rock Lighthouse or the Pacific 
Railroad, from the tattooing of the Owhy- 
hees to the Vatican Gallery, from the 
simplest expedient of private prudence to 
the American Constitution, from its first 
to its last works, Art is the spirit’s volun- 
tary use and combination of things to 
serve its end. The Will distinguishes it 
as spiritual action. Relatively to them- 
selves, the bee, the bird, the beaver, have 
no art; for what they do, they do in- 
stinctively ; but relatively to the Supreme 
Being, they have. And the same is true 
of all unconscious action : relatively to the 
doer, it is instinct ; relatively to the First 
Cause, it is Art. In this sense, recog- 
nising the Spirit which informs Nature, 
Plato rightly said, "Those things which 
are said to be done by Nature are indeed 
done by Divine Art." Art, universally, is 
the spirit creative. It was defined by Aris- 
totle, "The reason of the thing, witliout 
the matter." 

If we follow the proper distinction of 
works according to their aim, we should 
say. the Spirit, in its creation, aims at use 
or at beauty, and hence Art divides itself 
into the Useful and the Fine Arts, 


The useful arts comprehend not only 
those that lie next to instinct, as agricul- 
ture, building, weaving, &c., but also navi- 
gation, practical chemistry, and the con- 
struction of all the grand and delicate tools 
and instruments by which man serves 
himself; as language, the watch, the ship, 
the decimal cypher ; and also the sciences, 
so far as they are made serviceable to 
political economy. 

When we reflect on the pleasure we 
receive from a ship, a railroad, a dry- 
dock; or from a picture, a dramatic re- 
presentation, a statue, a poem, we find that 
these have not a quite simple, but a blended 
origin. We find that the question. What 
is Art ? leads us directly to another — Who 
is the artist ? and the solution of this is 
the key to the history of Art. 

I hasten to state the principle which 
prescribes, through different means, its 
firm law to the useful and the beautiful 
arts. ^ The law is this. The universal 
soul is the alone creator of the useful 
and the beautiful ; therefore, to make any- 
thing useful or beautiful, the individual 
must be submitted to the universal mind. 

In the first place, let us consider this ia 
reference to the useful arts. Here the 
omnipotent agent is Nature; all human 
acts are satellites to her orb. Nature is 
the representative of the universal mind, 
and the law becomes this — that Art must 
bo a complement to Nature, strictly sub- 
siduary. It was said, in allusion to the 
great structures of the ancient Romans— 
the aqueducts and bridges—that " their 
Art was a Nature working to municipal 
ends." That is a true account of all just 
works of useful art. Smeaton built Eddy- 
stone Lighthouse on the model of an oak- 
tree, as being the form in nature best 
designed to resist a constant assailing 
force. Dollond formed his achromatic tele- 
scope on the model of the human eye, 
Duhamel built a bridge by letting in a 
piece of stronger timber for the middle of 
the under surface, getting his hint from 
the structure of liiO shin-bone. 

The first and last lesson of the useful 
arts is, that Nature tyrannizes over our 
works. They must be conformed to her 
law, or they will be ground to powder by 
her omnipresent activity. Nothing droll, 
nothing whimsical will endure. Nature is 
ever interfering with Art. You cannot 
build your house or pagoda as you will, 
but as you must. There is a quick bound 
set to your caprice. The leaning tower 
can oxt> lean so far. The verandah or 
pagoda loof can curve upward only to a 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


AU 

certain point The slope of your roof is 
determined by the weight of snow. It is 
only within narrow limits that the discre- 
tion of the architect may range : gravity, 
wind, sun, rain, the size of men and ani- 
mals, and such like, have more to say than 
he. It is; the law of fluids that prescribes 
the shape of the boat — keel, rudder, and 
bows — and, in the finer fluid above, the 
form and tackle of the sails. Man seems 
to have no option about his tools, but 
merely the necessity to learn from Nature 
what will fit best, as if he were fitting a 
screw or a door. Beneath a necessity 
thus almighty, what is artificial in man’s 
life seems insignificant. He seems to take 
his task so minutely from intimations of 
nature, that his works become as it were 
hers, and he is no longer free. 

But if we work within this limit, she 
yields us all her strength. All powerful 
action is performed by bringing the forces 
of nature to bear upon our objects. We 
do not grind corn nor lift the loom by 
our own strength, but we build a mill in 
such position as to set the north wind to 
play upon our instrument, or the elastic 
force of steam, or the ebb and flow of the 
sea. So in our handiwork, we do few 
things by muscular force, but we place our- 
selves in such attitudes as to bring the 
force of gravity, that is, the weight of the 
planet, to bear upon the spade or the axe 
we wield. In short, in all our operations 
we seek not to use our own, but to bring 
a quite infinite force to bear. 

Let us now consider this law as it afif^ects 
the works that have beauty for their end ; 
that is, the productions of the Fine Arts. 
Here again the prominent fact is sub- 
ordination of man. His art is the least 
part of his work of art. A great deduction 
is to be made before we can know his 
proper contribution to it. 

Music, Eloquence, Poetry, Painting, 
Sculpture, Architecture. This is a rough 
enumeration of the Fine Arts. I omit 
Rhetoric, which only respects the form of 
eloquence and poetry. Architecture and 
eloquence are mixed arts, whose end is 
sometimes beauty and sometimes use. 

It will be seen that in each of these arts 
there is much which is not spiritual. Each 
has a material basis, and in each the 
creating intellect is crippled in some 
degree by the stuff on which it works. 
The basis of poetry is language, which is 
material only on one side. It is a demi- 
god. But being applied primarily to the 
common necessities of man, it ta not new- 
created by the poet for hia own enda. 


The basis of music is the qualities cf 
the air and the vibrations of sonorous 
bodies. The pulsation of a stretched 
string or wire gives the ear the pleasure 
of sweet sound, before yet the musician 
has enhanced this pleasure by concords 
and combinations. 

Eloquence, as far as it is a fine art, is 
modified how much by the material or- 
ganization of the orator, the tone of the 
voice, the physical strength, the play of 
the eye and countenance, All this is so 
much deduction from the purely spiritual 
pleasure — as so much deduction from the 
merit of Art — and is the attribute of 
Nature. 

In painting, bright colours stimulate the 
eye, before yet they are harmonized into 
a landscape. In sculpture and in archi- 
tecture, the material, as marble or granite, 
and in architecture the mass, are sources 
of great pleasure, quite independent of the 
artificial arrangement. The art resides in 
the model, in the plan ; for it is on that 
the genius of the artist is expended, noton 
the statue or the temple. Just as much 
better as is the polished statue of dazzling 
marble than the clay model, or as much 
more impressive as is the granite cathe- 
dral or p3nramid than the ground-plan or 
profile of them on paper, so much more 
beauty owe they to Nature than to Art. 

There is a still larger deduction to be 
made from the genius of the artist in 
favour of Nature than I have yet specified. 

A jumble of musical sounds on a viol or 
a flute, in which the rhythm of the tune is 
played without one of the notes being 
right, gives pleasure to the unskilful ear. 
A very coarse imitation of the human form 
on canvas, or in wax-work — a coarse 
sketch in colours of a landscape, in which 
imitation is all that is attempted— these 
things give to unpractised eyes, to the un- 
cultured, who do no ask a fine spiritual 
delight, almost as much pleasure as a 
statue of Canova or a picture of Titian. 

And in the statue of Canova, or the 
picture of Titian, these give the great part 
of the pleasure ; they are the basis on 
which the fine spirit rears a higher delight, 
but to wnich these are indispensable. 

Another deduction from the genius of 
the artist is what is conventional in his 
art, of which there is much in every work 
of art. Thus how much is there that is 
not original in every particular building, 

I in every statue, in every tune, painting, 
poem, or harangue I — whatever is national 
or usual; as the usage of building all 
I Roman churches in the form of a cros^ , 



Akt. 


the pfescribed distribution of parts of a 
theatre, the custom of draping a statue in 
classical costume. Yet who will deny that 
the merely conventional part of the per- 
formance contributes much to its effect ? 

One consideration more exhausts, I be- 
lieve, all the deductions from the genius 
of the artist in any given work. This is 
the adventitious. Thus the pleasure that 
a noble temple gives us is only in part 
owing to the temple. It is exalted by the 
beauty of sunlight, the play of the clouds, 
the landscape around it, its grouping with 
the houses, trees, and towers in its vi- 
cinity. The pleasure of eloquence is in 
greatest part owing often to die stimulus 
of the occasion which produces it — to the 
magic of sympathy, which exalts the feel- 
ing of each by radiating on him the feeling 
of all, 

The effect of music belongs how much 
to the place — as the church, or the moon- 
light walk ; or to the company ; or, if on 
the stage, to what went before in the play, 
or to the expectation of what shall come 
after. 

In poetry, "It is tradition more than 
invention that helps the poet to a good 
fable." The adventitious beauty of poetry 
may be felt in the greater delight which a 
verse gives in happy quotation than in the 
poem, 

It is a curious proof of our conviction 
that the artist does not feel himself to be 
the parent of his work, and is as much 
surprised at the effect as v/e, that we are 
so unwilling to impute our best sense of 
any work of art to the author. The highest 
praise we can attribute to any writer, 
painter, sculptor, builder, is, that he actu- 
ally possessed the thought or feeling with 
which he has inspired us. We hesitate at 
doing Spenser so great an honour as to 
think that lie intended by his allegory the 
sense we affix to it. We grudge to Homer 
the wide human circumspection his com- 
mentators ascribe to him. Even Shak- 
speare, of whom we can believe every- 
thing, wo think indebted to Goethe and to 
Coleridge for the wisdom they detect in 
his Hamlet and Antony. Especially have 
we this infirmity of faith in contemporary 
genius. We fear that Allston and Green- 
ough did not foresee and design all the 
effect they produce on us. 

Our arts are happy hits. We are like 
the musician on the lake, whose melody is 
sweeter than he knows, or like a traveller, 
surprised by a mountain echo, whose 
trivial word returns to him in romantic 
thunders. 


415 

In view of these facts, 1 Bay that the 
power of Nature predominates over the 
human will in all works of even ♦he fine 
arts, in all that respects their material and 
external circumstances. Nature paints 
the best part of the picture ; carves the 
best part of the statue; builds the best 
part of the house ; and speaks the best pare 
of the oration. For all the advantages to 
which I have adverted are such as the 
artist did not consciously produce. He 
relied on their aid, he put himself in the 
way to receive aid from some of them; 
but he saw that his planting and his water- 
ing waited for the sunlight of Nature, or 
were vain. 

Let us proceed to the consideration of 
the law stated in the beginning of this 
essay, as it affects the purely spiritual part 
of a work of art, 

As, in useful art, so far as it is useful, 
the work must be strictly subordinated to 
i the laws of Nature, so as to become a sort 
of continuation, and in no wise a contra- 
diction of Nature ; so, in art that aims at 
beauty, must the parts be subordinated to 
Ideal Nature, and everything individual 
' abstracted, so that it shall be the produc- 
tion of the universal soul. 

The artist who is to produce a work 
which is to be admired, not by his friends 
or his townspeople or his contemporaries, 
but by all men, and which is to be more 
beautiful to the eye in proportion to its cul- 
ture, must disindividualise himself, and be 
a man of no party, and no manner, and no 
age, but one through whom the soul of all 
men circulates, as the common air through 
his lungs. He must work in the spirit in 
which we conceive a prophet to speak, or 
an angel of the Lord to act ; that is, he is 
not to speak his own words, or do his own 
works, or think his own thoughts, but he 
is to be an organ through which the uni- 
versal mind acts. 

In speaking of the useful arts, I pointed 
to the fact that we do not dig, or grind, 
or hew, by our muscular strength, but by 
bringing the weiglit of tlie planet to bear 
on the spade, axe, or bar. Precisely ana- 
logous to this, in the fine arts, is the 
manner of our intellectual work. We aim 
to hinder our individuality from acting. 
So much as we can shove aside our ego- 
tism, our prejudice, and will, and bring 
the omniscience of reason upon the sub- 
ject before us, so perfect is the work. The 
wonders of Shakspeare are things which 
he saw whilst he stood aside, and then 
returned to record them. The poet aims 
at getting observations without aim ; t 9 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


416 

•ubject to thought things seen without 
(voluntary) thought. 

In eloquence, the great triumphs of the 
art are, when the orator is lifted above 
himself ; when consciously he makes him- 
self the mere tongue of the occasion and 
the hour, and says what cannot but be 
said. Hence the term abandonment, to 
describe the self-surrender of the orator. 
Not his will, but the principle on which he 
is horsed, the great connection and crisis 
of events, thunder in the ear of the crowd. 

In poetry, where every word is free, 
every word is necessary. Good poetry 
could not have been otherwise written 
than it is. The first time you hear it, it 
sounds rather as if copied out of some in- 
visible ta.blet in the Eternal mind, than 
as if arbitrarily composed by the poet. 
The feeling of all great poets has accorded 
with this. They found the verse, not 
made it. The muse brought it to them. 

In sculpture, did ever anybody call the 
Apollo a fancy piece ? Or say of Laocoon 
how it might be made different ? A 
masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed 
place in the chain of being, as much as a 
plant or a crystal. 

The whole language of men, especially 
of artists, in reference to this subject, 
points at the belief that every work of 
art, in proportion to its excellence, par- 
takes of the precision of fate: no room 
was there for choice, no play for fancy ; 
for in the moment, or in the successive 
moments, when that form was seen, the 
iron lids of Reason were unclosed, which 
ordinarily are heavy with slumber. The 
individual mind became for the moment 
the vent of the mind of humanity. 

There is but one Reason. The mind 
that made the world is not one mind, 
but the mind. Every man is an inlet to 
the same, and to all of the same. And 
every work of art is a more or less pure 
manifestation of the same. Therefore we 
arrive at this conclusion, which I offer as 
a confirmation of the whole view, that 
the delight which a work of art affords 
seems to arise from our recognizing in it 
the mind that formed Nature again in 
active operation. 

It differs from the works of Nature in 
this, that they axe organically reproduc- 
tive. This is not, but spiritually it is 
prolific by its powerful action on the in- 
tellects of men. 

Hence it follows that a study of admir- 
able works of art sharpens our perceptions 
of the beauty of Nature ; that a certain 
analogy reigns throughout the wonders of 


both ; that the contemplation of a work 
of great art draws us into a state of mind 
which may be called religious. It con- 
spires with all exalted sentiments. 

Proceeding from absolute mind, whose 
nature is goodness as much as truth, the 
great works are always attuned to moral 
nature. If the earth and sea conspire 
with virtue more than vice — so do the 
masterpieces of art. The galleries of 
ancient sculpture in Naples and Rome 
strike no deeper conviction into the mind 
than the contrast of the purity, the se- 
verity, expressed in these fine old heads, 
with the frivolity and grossness of the 
mob that exhibits and the mob that gazes 
at them. These are the countenances of 
the first-born — the face of man in the 
morning of the world. No mark is on 
these lofty features of sloth, or luxury, or 
meanness, and they surprise you with a 
moral admonition, as they speak of noth- 
ing around you, but remind you of the 
fragrant thoughts and the purest resolu- 
tions of your youth. 

Herein is the explanation of the analo- 
gies which exist in all the arts. They are 
the reappearance of one mind, working in 
many materials to many temporary ends, 
Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, 
Phidias carves it, Shakspearo writes ib 
Wren builds it Columbus sails it, Luthei 
preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt 
mechanizes it. Painting was called 
“ silent poetry ; ” and poetry, " speaking 
painting.” The laws of each art are 
convertible into the laws of every other. 

Herein we have an explanation of the 
necessity that reigns in all the kingdom 
of Art. 

Arising out of eternal Reason, one and 
perfect, whatever is beautiful rests on the 
foundation of the necessary. Nothing is 
arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. 
It depends for ever on the necessary and 
the useful. The plumage of the bird, the 
mimic plumage of the insect, has a reason 
for its rich colours in the constitution of 
the animal, Fitness is so inseparable an 
accompaniment of beauty, that it has been 
taken for it. The most perfect form to 
answer an end is so far beautiful. We 
feel, in seeing a noble building, which 
rhymes well, as we do in hearing a per- 
fect song, that it is spiritually organic; 
that is, had a necessity, in nature, for 
being, was one of the possible forms in 
the Divine mind, and is now only dis- 
covered and executed by the artist, not 
arbitrarily composed by him. 

And so every genuine work of art has 



ART. 


fts much reason for being as the earth and 
the sun. The gayest charm of beauty has 
a root in the constitution of things. The 
Iliad of Homer, the songs of David, the 
odes of Pindar, the tragedies of ^Eschylus, 
the Doric temples, the Gothic cathedrals, 
the plays of Shakspeare, all and each 
were made not for sport, but in grave 
earnest, in tears and smiles of suffering 
and loving men. 

Viewed from this point, the history of 
Art becomes intelligible, and, moreover, 
one of the most agreeable studies. We 
see how each work of art sprang irresisti- 
bly from necessity, and, moreover, took 
its form from the broad hint of Nature. 
Beautiful in this wise is the obvious 
origin of all the known orders of archi- 
tecture ; namely, that they were the 
idealizing of the primitive abodes of each 
people. There was no wilfulness in the 
savages in this perpetuating of their first 
rude abodes. The first form in which 
they built a house would be the first form 
of their public and religious edifice also. 
This form becomes immediately sacred in 
the eyes of their children, and, as more 
traditions cluster round it, is imitated with 
more splendour in each succeeding genera- 
tion. 

In like manner, it has been remarked 
by Goethe that the granite breaks into 
parallelepipeds, which broken in two, one 
part would bean obelisk; that in Upper 
Egypt the inhabitants would naturally 
mark a memorable spot by setting up so 
conspicuous a stone. Again, he suggested, 
we may see in any stone wall, on a frag- 
ment of rock, the projecting veins of 
harder stone, which have resisted the 
action of frost and water which has de- 
composed the rest. This appearance 
certainly gave the hint of the hieroglyphics 
inscribed on their obelisk. The amphi- 
theatre of the old Romans —any one may 
see its origin who looks at the crowd 
running together to see any fight, sickness, 
or odd appearance in the street. The 
first-comers gather round in a circle ; 
those behind stand on tip-toe ; and farther 
back they climb on fences or window- 
sills, and so make a cup of which the 
object of attention occupies the hollow 
area. The architect put benches in this, 
and inclosed the cup with a wall — and, 
behold a coliseum ! 

It would be easy to show of many fine 
things in the world — in the customs of 
nations, the etiquette of courts, the con- 
stitution of governments — the origin in 
quite simple local necessities. Heraldry, 


417 

for example, and the ceremonies of a 
coronation, are a dignified repetition of 
the occurrences that might befal a dra- 
goon and his footboy. The College of 
Cardinals were originally the parish 
priests of Rome. The leaning towers 
originated from the civil discords which 
induced every lord to build a tower. Then 
it became a point of family pride — and 
for more pride the novelty of a leaning 
tower was built. 

This strict dependence of Art upon 
material and ideal Nature, this adaman- 
tine necessity which underlies it, has 
made all its past, and may foreshow its 
future history. It never was in the power 
of any man, or any community, to call the 
arts into being. They come to serve his 
actual wants, never to please his fancy. 
These arts have their origin always in 
some enthusiasm, as love, patriotism, or 
religion. Who carved the marble ? The 
believing man, who wished to symbolize 
their gods to the waiting Greeks. 

The Gothic cathedrals were built when 
the builder and the priest and the people 
were overpowered by their faith. Love 
and fear laid every stone. The Madonnas 
of Raphael and Titian were made to be 
worshipped. Tragedy was instituted for 
the like purpose, and the miracles of 
music : all sprang out of some genuine 
enthusiasm, and never out of dilettanteisra 
and holidays. Now they languish, be- 
cause their purpose is merely exhibition, 

! Who cares, who knows what works of art 
' our government have ordered to be made 
for the Capitol ? They are a mere flourish 
to please the eye of persons who have 
associations with books and galleries. But 
in Greece, the Demos of Athens divided 
into political factions upon the merits of 
Phidias. 

In this country, at this time, other in- 
terests than religion and patriotism are 
predominant, and the arts, the daughters 
of enthusiasm, do not flourish. The 
genuine offspring of our ruling passions 
we behold. Popular institutions, the 
school, the reading-room, the telegraph, 
the post-office, the exchange, the insur- 
ance-company, and the immense harvest 
of economical inventions, are the fruit of 
the equality and the boundless liberty of 
lucrative callings. These are superficial 
wants ; and their fruits are these superfi- 
cial institutions. But as far as they 
accelerate the end of political freedom 
and national education, they are prepar- 
ing the soil of man for fairer flowers and 
fruits in another age« For beauty, truthi 



4x8 SOCIETY AUB SOLITUDE. 

And goodness are not obsolete ; they Eternal Spirit, whose triple faoe they are, 
spring eternal in the breast of man ; they moulds from them for ever, for his mortal 
are as indigenous in Massachusetts as in child, images to remind him of the In* 
Tuscany or the Isles of Greece. And that finite and Fair. 


ELOQUENCE. 

It is the doctrine of the popular music- versal feeling of the energy of the engine, 
masters, that whoever can speak can sing, and the curiosity men feel to touch the 
So, probably, every man is eloquent once springs. Of all the musical instruments 
in his life. Our temperaments differ in on which men play, a popular assembly is 
capacity of heat, or, we boil at different that which has the largest compass and 
degrees. One man is brought to the variety, and out of which, by genius and 
boiling-point by the excitement of conver- study, the most wonderful effects can be 
sation in the parlour. The waters, of course, drawn. An audience is not a simple addi- 
are not very deep. He has a two-inch tion of the individuals that compose it. 
enthusiasm, a patty-pan ebullition. An- Their sympathy gives them a certain social 
other requires the additional caloric of a organism, which fills each member, in his 
multitude, and a public debate ; a third own degree, and most of all the orator, 
needs an antagonist, or a hot indignation ; as a jar in a battery is charged with the 
a fourth needs a revolution ; and a fifth, whole electricity of the battery. No one 
nothing less than the grandeur of absolute can survey the face of an excited assem^ 
ideas, the splendours and shades of Heaven bly,without being apprised of new oppor- 
and Hell. tunity for painting in fire human thought. 

But because every man is an orator, and being agitated to agitate. How many 
how long soever ho may have been a orators sit mute there below ! They coma 
mute, an assembly of men is so much to get justice done to that ear and intuition 
more susceptible. The eloquence of one which no Chatham and no Demosthenes 
stimulates all the rest, some up to the has begun to satisfy, 
speaking-point, and all others to a degree The Welsh Triads say, " Many are the 
that makes them good receivers and con- friends of the golden tongue ” Who can 
ductors, and they avenge themselves for wonder at the attractiveness of Parlia- 
their enforced silence by increased lo- ment, or of Congress, or the bar, for our 
quacity on their return to the fireside. ambitious young men, when the highest 
The plight of these phlegmatic brains bribes of society are at the feet of tlie 
1* better than that of those who pre- successful orator? He has his audience 
maturely boil, and who impatiently break at his devotion. All other fames must 
silence before their time. Our county hush before his. He is the true potentate ; 
conventions often exhibit a small-pot- for they are not kings v/ho sit on thrones, 
soon-hot style of eloquence. We are too but they who know how to govern. The 
much reminded of a medical experiment definitions of eloquence describe its at- 
where a series of patients are taking traction for young men. Antiphon the 
nitrous-oxide gas. Each patient, in turn, Rhamnusian, one of Plutarch’s ten orators, 
exhibits similar symptoms — redness in advertised in Athens “ that he would cure 
the face, volubility, violent gesticulation, distempers of the mind with words.” No 
delirious attitudes, occasional stamping, man has a prosperity so high or firm but 
an alarming loss of perception of the two or three words can dishearten it, 
passage of time, a selfish enjoyment of There is no calamity which right words 
his sensations, and los.s of perception of will not begin to redress. Isocrates de- 
the sufferings of the audience. senoed his art as “ the power oi magnify- 

Plato says, that the punishment which ing what was small and diminishing what 
the wise suffer, who refuse to take part in was great " — an acute but partial defini- 
the government, is, to live under the tion. Among the Spartans, the art assumed 
government of worse men ; and the like a Spartan shape : namely, of the sharpest 
regret is suggested to all the auditors, as weapon. Socrates says: “If any one 
the penalty of abstaining to speak — that wishes to converse with the meanest of 
they shall hear worse orators than them- the Lacedaemonians, he will at first find 
selves. him despicable in conversation ; but, when 

But this last to apeak marks the nni- a proper opportunity offers, this same 



ELOQUENCE. 


person, like a skilful jaculator, will hurl a 
sentence worthy of attention, short and 
contorted, so that he who converses with 
him will appear to be in no respect su- 
perior to a boy.” Plato’s definition of 
rhetoric is, ” the art of ruling the minds 
of men.” The Koran says, ” A mountain 
may change its place, but a man will not 
change his disposition”; yet the end of 
eloquence is — is it not ? — to alter in a pair 
of hours, perhaps in a half-hour’s dis- 
course, the convictions and habits of years. 
Young men, too, are eager to enjoy this 
sense of added power and enlarged sym- 
pathetic existence. The orator sees him- 
self the organ of a multitude, and concen- 
trating their valours and powers : 

“ But now the blood of twenty thousand men 
Blushed in my face.” 

That which he wishes, that which elo- 
quence ought to reach, is, not a particular 
skill in telling a story, or neatly summing 
up evidence, or arguing logically, or dex- 
terously addressing the prejudice of the 
company — no, but a taking sovereign pos- 
session of the audience. Him we call an 
artist who shall play on an assembly of 
men as a master on the keys of the 
piano — who, seeing the people furious, 
shall soften and compose them, shall draw 
them, when he will, to laughter and to 
tears. Bring him to his audience, and, be 
they who they may — coarse or refined, 
pleased or displeased, sulky or savage, 
with their opinions in the keeping of a 
confessor, or with their opinions in their 
bank-safes — he will have them pleased 
and humoured as he chooses ; and they 
shall carry and execute that which he bids 
them. 

This is that despotiscs which poets have 
celebrated in the ” Pied Piper of Hame- 
lin,” whose music drew like the power of 
gravitation — drew soldiers and priests, 
traders and feasters, women and boys, rats 
and mice ; or that of the minstrel of Meu- 
don, who made the pall-bearers dance 
around the bier. This is a power of many 
degrees, and requiring in the orator a great 
range of faculty and experience, requiring 
a large composite man, such as nature 
rarely organizes ; so that, in our experi- 
ence, we are forced to gather up the figure 
in fragments, here one talent, and there 
another. 

The audience is a constant metre of 
the orator. There are many audiences 
in every public assembly, each one of 
which rules in turn. If anything comic 
imd coarse is spoken, fou shall see the 


4x9 

emetgence oi the boys and rowdies, so 
loud and vivacious that you might think 
the house was filled with them. If new 
topics are started, graver and higher, 
these roisters recede ; a more chaste and 
wise attention takes place. You would 
think the boys slept, and that the men 
have any degree of profoundness, If the 
speaker utter a noble sentiment, the atten- 
tion deepens, a new and highest audience 
now listens, and the audiences of the fun 
and of facts and of the understanding are 
all silenced and awed. There is also 
something excellent in every audience — • 
the capacity of virtue. They are ready to 
be beatified. They know so much more 
than the orator — and are so just! There 
is a tablet there for every line he can 
inscribe, though he should mount to the 
highest levels. Humble persons are con- 
scious of new illumination ; narrow brows 
expand with enlarged affections ; delicate 
spirits, long unknown to themselves, 
masked and muffled in coarsest fortunes, 
who now hear their own native language 
for the first time, and leap to hear it. 
But all these several audiences, each above 
each, which successively appear to greet 
the variety of style and topic, are really 
composed out of the same persons ; nay, 
sometimes the same individual will take 
active part in them all, in turn. 

This range of many powers in the con- 
summate speaker, and of many audiences 
in one assembly, leads us to consider the 
successive stages of oratory. 

Perhaps it is the lowest of the qualities 
of an orator, but it is, on so many occa- 
sions, of chief importance — a certain 
robust and radiant physical health ; or — 
shall I say ? — great volumes of animal 
heat. When each orator feels himself to 
make too large a part of the assembly, 
and shudders with cold at the thinness of 
the morning audience, and with fear lest 
all will heavily fail through one bad speech, 
mere energy and mellowness are then in- 
estimable. Wisdom and learning would 
be harsh and unwelcome, compared with 
a substantial cordial man, made of milk, 
as we say, who is a house-warmer, with 
his obvious honesty and good meaning, 
and a hue-and-cry style of harangue, 
which inundates the assembly with a flood 
of animal spirits, and makes all safe and 
secure, so that any aud every sort of good 
speaking becomes at once practicable. I 
do not rate this animal eloquence very 
highly; and yet as we must be fed and 
warmed before we can do any work well 
— even the best*— so is this semi-animal 



4*0 


SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


exuberance, like a good stove, of the 6rst 
necessity in a cold house. 

Climate has much to do with it — 
climate and race. Set a New-Englander 
to describe any accident which happened 
in his presence. What hesitation and 
reserve in his narrative I He tells with 
difficulty some particulars, and gets as 
fast as he can to the result, and, though 
he cannot describe, hopes to suggest the 
whole scene. Now listen to a poor Irish- 
woman recounting some experience of 
hers. Her speech flows like a river — so 
unconsidered, so humorous, so pathetic, 
such justice done to all the parts I It is 
a true transubstantiation — the fact con- 
verted into speech, all warm and coloured 
and alive, as it fell out. Our Southern 
people are almost all speakers, and have 
every advantage over the New England 
people, whose climate is so cold that ’tis 
said we do not like to open our mouths 
very wide. But neither can the Southerner 
in the United States, nor the Irish, com- 
pare with the lively inhabitant of the 
south of Europe. The traveller in Sicily 
needs no gayer melodramatic exhibition 
than the table d'hdte of his inn will afford 
him in the conversation of the joyous 
guests. They mimic the voice and manner 
of the person they describe *, they crow, 
squeal, hiss, cackle, bark and scream like 
mad, and, were it only by the physical 
strength exerted in telling the story, keep 
the table in unbounded excitement. But 
in every constitution some large degree 
of animal vigour is necessary as material 
foundation for the higher qualities of the 
art. 

But eloquence must be attractive, or 
it is none. The virtue of books is, to 
be readable, and of orators, to be in- 
teresting ; and this is a gift of Nature ; 
as Demosthenes, the most laborious 
student in that kind, signifled his sense 
of this necessity when he wrote, “ Good 
Fortune,” as his motto on his shield. 
As we know, the power of discourse of 
certain individuals amounts to fascina- 
tion, though it may have no lasting 
effect. Some portion of this sugar must 
intermingle. The right eloquence needs 
no b611 to call the people together, and 
no constable to keep them. It draws 
the children from their play, the old 
from their arm-chairs, the invalid from 
bis warm chamber : it holds the hearer 
fast; steals away his feet, that he shall 
not depart — his memory, that he shall 
not remember the most pressing aflairs, 
•—his belief, that be shall not admit any 


opposing considerations. The pictures 
we have of it in semi-barbarous ages, 
when it has some advantages in the 
simpler habit of the people, show what 
it aims at. It is said that the Khans, or 
story-tellers, in Ispahan and other cities 
of the East, attain a controlling power 
over their audiences, Keeping them for 
many hours attentive to the most fanci- 
ful and extravagant adventures. The 
whole world knows pretty well the style 
of these improvisators, and how fasci- 
nating they are, in our translations of 
the “ Arabian Nights.” Scheherezade 
tells these stories to save her life, and 
the delight of young Europe and young 
America in them proves that she fairly 
earned it. And who does not remember 
in childhood some white or black or 
yellow Scheherezade, who, by that talent 
of telling endless feats of fairies and 
magicians, and kings and queens, was 
more dear and wonderful to a circle of 
children than any orator in England or 
America is now ? The more indolent 
and imaginative complexion of the 
Eastern nations makes them much more 
impressible by these appeals to the 
fancy. 

These legends are only exaggerations 
of real occurrences, and every literature 
contains these high compliments to the 
art of the orator and the bard, from the 
Hebrew and the Greek down to the 
Scottish Glenkindie, who 

“harplt a fish out o» saut water. 

Or water out of a stone, 

Or milk out of a maiden’s breast 
Who bairn had never none.” 

Homer specially delighted in drawing 
the same figure. For what is the 
“Odyssey” but a history of the orator, 
In the largest style, carried through a 
series of adventures furnishing brilliant 
opportunities to his talent ? See with 
what care and pleasure the poet brings 
him on the stage. Helen is pointing 
out to Priam, from a tower, the different 
Grecian chiefs. “The old man asked; 
’Tell me, dear child, who is that man 
shorter by a head than Agamemnon, 
yet he looks broader in his alioulders and 
breast. His arms lie on the ground, but 
he, like a leader, walks about the bands 
of the men. He seems to me like a 
stately ram, who goes as a master of the 
flock.’ Him answered Helen, daughter 
of Jove : ' This is the wise Ulysses, son 
of Laertes, who was reared in the state of 
craggy Ithaca, knowing all wiles and wisq 



BLOQUBNCB. 


counsels.' To her the prudent Antenor 
replied again : * O woman, you have 

spoken truly. For once the wise Ulysses 
came hither on an emba^isy, with Mene- 
laus, beloved by Mars, I received them, 
and entertained them at my house. I 
became acquainted with the genius and 
the prudent judgments of both. When 
they mixed with the assembled Trojans, 
and stood, the broad shoulders of Mene- 
laus rose above the other; but, both sit- 
ting, Ulysses was more majestic. When 
they conversed, and interweaved stories 
and opinions with all, Menelaus spoke suc- 
cinctly — few but very sweet words, since 
he was not talkative, nor superfluous in 
speech, and was the younger. But when 
the wise Ulysses arose, and stood, and 
looked down, fixing his eyes on the 
ground, and neither moved his sceptre 
backward nor forward, but held it still, 
like an awkward person, you would say it 
was some angry or foolish man ; but when 
he sent his great voice forth out of his 
breast, and his words fell like the winter 
snows, not then would any mortal contend 
,with Ulysses; and we, beholding, won- 
dered not afterwards so much at his 
'aspect,' "• Thus ho does not fail to arm 
'Ulysses at first with this power of over- 
coming all opposition by the blandishments 
of speech. Plutarch tells us that Thucy- 
dides, when Archidamus, king of Sparta, 
asked him which was the best wrestler — 
Pericles or he — replied, “ When I throw 
him, ne says ne was never down, and 
he persuades the very spectators to be- 
lieve him.” Philip of Macedon said of 
Demosthenes, on hearing the report of 
one of his orations, " Had I been there, 
he would have persuaded me to take up 
arms aga.inst myself ; ” and Warren 
Hastin'gs said of Burke's speech on his 
impeachment. ** As I listened to the 
orator, I felt for more than half an hour 
as if I were the most culpable being on 
earth.” 

In these examples, higher qualities 
have already entered ; but the power of 
detaining the ear by pleasing speech, 
and addressing the fancy and imagina- 
tion, often exists without higher merits. 
Thus separated, as this fascination of 
discourse aims only at amusement, 
though it be decisive in its momentary 
effect it is yet a juggle, and of no lasting 
power. It is heard like a band of music 
passing through the streets, which con- 
«(»rts aU the passengers into poets, but 


Is forgotten as soon as it has turned the 
next corner ; and unless this oiled tongue 
could, in Oriental phrase, lick the sun 
and moon away, it must take its place 
with opium and brandy. I know no 
remedy against it but cotton-wool, or 
the wax which Ulysses stuffed into the 
ears of his sailors to pass the Sirens 
safely. 

There are all degrees of power, and 
the least are interesting, but they must 
not be confounded. There is the glib 
tongue and cool self-possession of the 
salesman in a large shop, which, as is 
well known, overpower the prudence and 
resolution of housekeepers of both se^es. 
There is a petty lawyer’s fluency, which 
is sufficiently impressive to him who is 
devoid of that talent, though i^ b©, jn so 
many cases, nothing more tb an* a facility 
of expressing with accuracy and speed 
what everybody thinks and says more 
slowly, without new information, or pre- 
cision of thought — but the same thing, 
neither less nor more. It requires no 
special insight to edit one of our country 
newspapers, Yet whoever can say oh 
currently, sentence by sentence, matter 
neither betcer nor worse than what is 
there printed, will be very impressive to 
our easily pleased population. These 
talkers are of that class who prosper, like 
the celebrated schoolmaster, by being 
OQiy one lesson ahead of the pupil. Add 
a little sarcasm, and prompt allusion to 
passing occurrences, and you have the 
mischievous member of Congress. A 
spice of malice, a ruffian touch in his 
rhetoric, will do him no harm with hia 
audience. These accomplishment are of 
the same kind, and only a degree higher, 
than the coaxing of the auctioneer, or the 
vituperative style well described in the 
street-word “jawing.” These kinds of 
public and private speaking have their use 
and convenience to the practitioners ; but 
we may say of such collectively, that the 
habit of oratory is apt to disqualify them 
for eloquence. 

One of our statesmen said, ** The cuf so 
of this country is eloquent men.” And 
one cannot wonder at the uneasiness* 
sometimes manifested by trained states- 
men, with large experience of public 
affairs, when they observe the dispropor- 
tionate advantage suddenly given to 
oratory over the most solid and accumu 
lated public service. In a Senate or othei 
business committee, the solid result de- 
pends on a few men with working talent 
The/ know bow to deal with the facta 


* XUad, 111. 191, 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


42a 

before them, to put things into a practical 
shape, and they value men only as they 
can forward the work. But a new man 
comes there, who has no capacity for 
helping them at all is insignificant, and 
nobody in the committee, but has a talent 
for speaking. In the debate with open 
doors, this precious person makes a 
speech, which is printed, and read all over 
the Union, and he at once becomes famous, 
and takes the lead in the public mind 
over all these executive men, who, of 
course, are full of indignation to find one 
who has no tact or skill, and knows he 
has none, put over them by means of this 
talking-power which they despise. 

Leaving behind us these pretensions, 
better or worse, to come a little nearer to 
the verity — eloquence is attractive as an 
example of the magic of personal ascend- 
ancy — a total and resultant power, rare, 
because it requires a rich coincidence of 
powers, intellect, will, sympathy, organs, 
and, over all, good fortune in the cause. 
We have a half-belief that the person is 
possible who can counterpoise all other 
persons. We believe that there may be a 
man who is a match for events — one who 
never found his match — against whom 
other men being dashed are broken — one 
of inexhaustible personal resources, who 
can give you any odds and beat you. 
What we really wish for is a mind equal 
to any exigency. You are safe in your 
rural district, or in the city, in broad day- 
light, amidst the police, and under the 
eyes of a hundred thousand people. But 
how is it on the Atlantic, in a storm — do 
you understand how to infuse your reason 
into men disabled by terror, and to bring 
yourself off safe then ? — how among 
thieves, or among an' infuriated populace, 
or among cannibals ? Face to face with a 
highwayman who has every temptation 
and opportunity for violence and plunder, 
can you bring yourself off safe by your 
wit, exercised through speech ? — a pro- 
blem easy enough to Caesar or Napoleon. 
Whenever a man of that stamp arrives, 
the highwayman has found a master. 
What a difference between men in power 
of face 1 A man succeeds because he has 
more power of eye than another, and so 
coaxes or confounds him. The news- 
papers, every week, report the adventures 
of some impu(#ent swindler, who, by 
steadiness of carriage, duped those who 
should have known better. Yet any 
swindlers we have known are novices and 
bunglers, as is attested by their ill name. 
▲ greater power of face would accomplish 


anythiog, and, with the rest of thelt 
takings, take away tne bad name. A 
greater power of carrying the thing loftily, 
and with perfect assurance, would con- 
found merchant, banker, judge, men of 
influence and power — poet and president 
— and might head any party, unseat any 
sovereign, and abrogate any constitution 
in Europe and America. It was said that 
a man has at one step attained vast power, 
who has renounced his moral sentiment, 
and settled it with himself that he will no 
longer stick at anything. It was said of 
Sir William Pepperel, one of the worthies 
of New England, that, “put him where 
you might, he commanded, and saw what 
he willed come to pass.” Julius Caesar 
said to Metullus, when that tribune inter- 
fered to hinder him from entering the 
Roman treasury, “ Young man, it is easier 
for me to put you to death than to say 
that I will;” and the youth yielded. In 
earlier days he was taken by pirates. 
What then ? He threw himself into their ^ 
ship, established the most extraordinary 
intimacies, told them stories, declaimed 
to them j if they did not applaud his 
speeches, he threatened them with hang- 
ing — which he performed afterwards — and 
in a short time, was master of all on 
board. A man this is who cannot be dis* 
concerted, and so can neiver play his last 
card, but has a reserve of power when ha 
has hit his mark. With a serene face, ha 
subverts a kingdom. What is told of him 
is miraculous ; it affects men so. Tha 
confidence of men in him is lavish, and 
he changes the face of the world, and his- 
tories, poems, and new philosophies arise 
to account for him. A supreme com- 
mander over all his passions and affec- 
tions; but the secret of his ruling is 
higher than that. It is the power of 
Nature running without impediment from 
the brain and will into the hands. Men 
and women are his game. Where they 
are, he cannot be without resource. 
“Whoso can speak well,” said Luther, 
“ is a man.” It was men of this stamp 
that the Grecian States used to ask of 
Sparta for generals. They did not send to 
Laeedeemon for troops, but they said. 
“ Send us a commander ; ” and Pausa- 
nias, or Gylippus, or Brasidas, or Agis, 
was despatched by the Ephors. 

It is easy to illustrate this overpowering 
personality by these examples of soldiers 
and kings ; but there are men of the most 
peaceful way of life, and peaceful prin- 
ciple, who are felt, wherever they go, as 
sensibly as a ]uly sun or a December 



ELOQUENCE. 


frost — men who, if they speak, are heard, 
though they speak in a whisper — who, 
when they act, act effectually, and what 
they do is imitated ; and these examples 
may be found on very humble platforms, 
as well as on high ones; 

In old countries, a high money-value is 
set on the services of men who have 
achieved a personal distinction. He who 
has points to carry must hire, not a skilful 
attorney, but a commanding person. A 
barrister in England is reputed to have ! 
made thirty or forty thousand pounds pet 
amitcm in representing the claims of rail- 
road companies before committees of the 
House of Commons. His clients pay not 
so much for legal as for manly accom- 
pIishments--for courage, conduct, and a 
commanding social position, which enable 
him to make their claims heard and 
respected. 

1 know very well, that, among our cool 
and calculating people, where every man 
mounts guard over himself, where heats 
and panics and abandonments are quite 
out of the system, there is a good deal of 
scepticism as to extraordinary influence. 
To talk of an overpowering mind rouses 
the same jealousy and defiance which one 
may observe round a table where anybody 
is recounting the marvellous anecdotes of 
mesmerism. Each auditor puts a final 
stroke to the discourse by exclaiming, 
“ Can he mesmerize me ? ” So each man 
inquires if any orator can change his 
convictions. 

But does any one suppose himself to be 
quite impregnable ? Docs he think that 
not possibly a man may come to him who 
shall persuade him out of his most settled 
determination ? — for example, good sedate 
citizen as he is, to make a fanatic of him 
— or, if he is penurious, to squander money 
for some purpose he now least thinks of — 
or, if he is a prudent, industrious person, 
to forsake his work, and give days and 
weeks to a new interest ? No, he defies 
any one, every one. Ah ! he is thinking 
of resistance, and of a different turn from 
his own. But what if one should come of 
the same turn of mind as his own, and 
who sees much farther on his own way 
than he ? A man who has tastes like 
mine, but in greater power, will rule me 
any day, and make me love my ruler. 

Thus it is not powers of speech that we 
primarily consider under this word do- 
qticnce, but the power that, being present, 
gives them their perfections, and, being 
absent, leaves them a merely superficial 

value. Eloquence if tljo appropriate 


4aS 

organ of the highest personal energy. 
Personal ascendancy may exist with or 
without adequate talent for its expression, 
It is as surely felt as a mountain or a 
planet; but when it is weaponed with a 
power of speech, it seems first to become 
truly human, works actively in all direc- 
tions, and supplies the imagination with 
fine materials. 

This circumstance enters into every 
consideration of the power of orators, and 
is the key to all their effects. In the 
assembly, you shall find the orator and 
the audience in perpetual balance ; and 
the predominance of cither is indicated 
by the choice of topic. If the talents for 
speaking exist, but not the strong per* 
sonality, then there are good speakers who 
perfectly receive and express the will of 
the audience, and the commonest popu- 
lace is flattered by hearing its low mind 
returned to it with every ornament which 
happy talent can add. But if there bo 
personality in the orator, the face of 
things changes. The audience is thrown 
into the attitude of pupil, follows like a 
child its preceptor, and hears what he hos 
to say. It is as if, amidst the king's council 
at Madrid, Ximenes urged that an advan- 
tage might be gained of France, and Men- 
doza that Flanders might be kept down, 
and Columbus, being introduced, was in- 
terrogated whether his geographical know- 
ledge could aid the cabinet, and he can 
say nothing to one party or to the other, 
but he can show how all Europe can bo 
diminished and reduced under the king, 
by annexing to Spain a continent as large 
as six or seven Europes. 

This balance between the orator and 
the audience is expressed in what is called 
the pertinence of the speaker. There is 
always a rivalry between the orator and 
the occasion, between the demands of tho 
hour and the prepossession of the indi- 
vidual. The emergency which has con- 
vened the meeting is usually of more im- 
portance than anything the debaters hava 
in their minds, and therefore becomes 
imperative to them. But if one of them 
have anything of commanding necessity 
in his heart, how speedily he will find 
vent for it, and with the applause of the 
assembly! This balance is observed in 
the privatest intercourse. Poor Tom never 
knew the time when the present occur- 
rence was so trivial that he could tell 
what was passing in his mind without 
being checked for unseasonable speech ; 
but let Bacon speak, and wise men would 
rather listen, though the revolution of 
2 R 



424 SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 

kingdoms was on foot, I have heard it matter what genius or distinction othe# 
reported of an eloquent preacher, whose men there present may have ; and in any 
voice is not yet forgotten in this city, public assembly, him who has the facts* 
that, on occasions of death or tragic and can and will state them, people will 
disaster, which overspread the congre- listen to, though he is otherwise ignorant 
gation with gloom, he ascended the pulpit though he is hoarse and ungraceful, though 
with more than his usual alacrity, and, he stutters and screams, 
turning to his favourite lessons of devout In a court of justice, the audience are 
and jubilant thankfulness — “ Let us impartial ; they really wish to sift the 
praise the Lord ” — carried audience, statements and know what the truth is. 
mourners, and mourning along with him. And in the examination of witnesses there 
and swept away all the impertinence of usually leap out, quite unexpectedly 
private sorrow with his hosannas and three or four stubborn words or phrases 
songs of praise, Pepys says of Lord which are the pith and fate of the busi- 
Clarendon (with whom “he is mad in ness, which sink into the ear of all parties, 
love”), on his return from a conference, and stick there, and determine the cause. 
“I did never observe how much easier a All the rest is repetition and qualifying ; 
man do speak when he knows all the and the court and the county have really 
company to be below him, than in him ; come together to arrive at these three or 
for, though he spoke indeed excellent four memorable expressions, which be- 
well, yet his manner and freedom of doing trayed the mind and meaning of somo- 
it, as if he played with it, and was inform- body. 

ing only all the rest of the company, was In every company, the man with th« 
mighty pretty.” • fact is like the guide you hire to lead 

This rivalry between the orator and the your party up a mountain, or through a 
occasion is inevitable, and the occasion difficult country. He may not compare 
always yields to the eminence of the with any of the party in mind, or breeding, 
speaker ; for a great man is the greatest or courage, or possessions, but he is much 
of occasions. Of course, the interest of more important to the present need than 
the audience and of the orator conspire, any of them. That is what we go to the 
It is well with them only when his in- court-house for — the statement ot the 
fluence is complete : then only they are fact, and the elimination of a general fact, 
well pleased. Especially, ho consults the real relation of all the parties ; and it ■ 
his power by making instead of taking is the certainty with which, indifferently 
his theme. If he should attempt to in- in any affair that is well handled, the 
struct the people in that which they already truth stares us in the face, through all the 
know, he would fail ; but, by making them disguises that are put upon it— a piece of 
wise in that which he knows, he has the the well-known human life— that makes 
advantage of the assembly every moment, the interest of a court-room to the intelli- 
Napoleon’s tactics of marching on the gent spectator. 

angle of an army, and always presenting I remember, long ago, being attracted 
a superiority of numbers, is the orator’s by the distinction of the counsel, and the 
secret also. local importance of the cause, into the 

The several talents which the orator court-room. The prisoner’s counsel were 
employs, the splendid weapons which went the strongest and cunningest lawyers in 
to the equipment of Demosthenes, of the Commonwealth. They drove the at- 
^schines, of Demades the natural orator, torney for the State from corner to corner, 
of Fox, of Pitt, of Patrick Henry, of Adams, taking his reasons from under him, and 
of Mirabeau, deserve a special enumera- reducing him to silence, but not to sub- 
tion. We must not quite omit to name mission. When hard pressed, he revenged 
the principal pieces, himself, io his turn, on the judge, by 

The orator, as we have seen, must be a requiring the court to define what salvage 
substantial personality. Then, first he was. The court, thus pushed, tried words, 
must have power of statement — must and said everything it could think of to 
have the fact, and know how to tell fill the time, supposing cases, and de- 
It. In any knot of men conversing on any scribing dutiesof insurers, captains, pilots, 
subject, the person who knows most about and miscellaneous sea-officers that are or 
it will have the ear of the company, if ho might bo— like a schoolmaster puzzled 
wishes iti and lead the conversatioil-'no by & sum, who reads the context 

with emphasis. But all this flood not 

* PUry, 1. iSm serving the cuttle-fish to get away in. the 



ELOQUENCE. 


horrible shark of the district attorney 
being still there, grimly awaiting with his 
“ The court must define "—the poor court 
pleaded its inferiority. The superior 
court must establish the law for this, and 
it read away piteously the decisions of the 
Supreme Court, but read to those who 
had no pity. The judge was forced at last 
to rule something, and the lawyers saved 
their rogue under the fog of a definition. 
The parts were so well cast and discri- 
minated, that it was an interesting game 
to watch. The government was well enough 
represented. It was stupid, but it had a 
strong will and possession, and stood on 
that to the last. The judge had a task 
beyond his preparation, yet his position 
remained real : he was there to represent 
a great reality— the justice of states, 
which we could well enough see beetling 
over his head, and which his trifling talk 
nowise affected, and did not impede, since 
ha was entirely well-meaning. 

The statement of the fact, however, 
finks before the statement of the law, 
which requires immeasurably higher 
powers, and is a rarest gift, being in all 
great masters one and the same thing — 
in lawyers, nothing technical, but always 
some piece of common sense, alike in- 
bresting to laymen as to clerks. Lord 
Mansfield’s merit is the merit of common 
sense. It is the same quality we admire 
in Aristotle, Montaigne, Cervantes, or in 
Samuel Johnson, or Franklin. Its appli- 
cation to law seems quite accidental. 
Each of Mansfield’s famous decisions con- 
tains a level sentence or two, which hit 
the mark. His sentences are not always 
finished to the eye, but are finished to the 
mind. The sentences are involved, but a 
solid proposition is set forth, a true dis- 
tinction is drawn. They come from and 
they go to the sound of human under- 
standing; and I read without surprise that 
the black-letter lawyers of the day sneered 
at his “ equitable decisions,” as if they 
were not also learned. This, indeed, is 
what speech is for — to make the state- 
ment; and all that is called eloquence 
seems to me of little use, for the most part, 
to those who have it, but inestimable to 
such as have something to say. 

Next to the knowledge of the fact and 
Its law is method, which constitutes the 
genius and efficiency of all remarkable 
men. A crowd of men go up to Faneuil 
Hall ; they are all pretty well acquainted 
with the object of the meeting ; they have 
all read the facts in the same newspapers, 
Xhd orator possesses no information which 


4*5 

his hearers have not ; yet he teaches them 
to see the thing with his eyes. By the 
new placing, the circumstances acquire 
new solidity and worth. Every fact gains 
consequence by his naming it, and trifles 
become important. His expressions fix 
themselves in men’s memories, and fly 
from mouth to mouth. His mind has 
some new principle of order. Where he 
looks, all things fly into their places. 
What will he say next ? Let this man 
speak, and this man only. By applying 
the habits of a higher style of thought to 
the common affairs of this world, he in- 
troduces beauty and magnificence wher- 
ever he goes. Such a power was Burke’s 
and of this genius we have had some bril- 
liant examples in our own political and 
legal men. 

Imagery. The orator must be, to a 
certain extent, a poet. We are such 
imaginative creatures, that nothing so 
works on the human mind, barbarous or 
civil, as a trope. Condense some daily 
experience into a glowing symbol, and an 
audience is electrified. They feel as if 
they already possessed some new right 
and power over a fact, which they can 
detach, and so completely master in 
thought. It is a wonderful aid to the 
memory, which carries away the image, ' 
and never loses it. A popular assembly, 
like the House of Commons, or the French 
Chamber, or the American Congress, is 
commanded by these two poweis — first 
by a fact, then by skill of statement. Put 
the argument into a concrete shape, into 
an image — some hard phrase, round and 
solid as a ball, which they can see and 
handle and carry home with them — and 
and the cause is half won. 

Statement, method, imagery, selection, 
tenacity of memory, power of dealing with 
facts, of illuminating them, of sinking 
them by ridicule or by diversion of the 
mind, rapid generalization, humour, 
pathos, are keys which the orator holds ; 
and yet these fine gifts are not eloquence, 
and do often hinder a man’s attainment 
of it. And if we come to the heart of the 
mystery, perhaps we should say that the 
truly eloquent man is a sane man with 
power to communicate his sanity. If you 
arm the man with the extraordinary 
weapons of this art, give him a grasp oi 
facts, learning, quick fancy, sarcasm, 
splendid allusion, interminable illustra* 
tion — all these talents, so potent and 
charming, have an equal power to ensnare 
and mislead the audience and the orator. 
His talents are too much for him, his 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


426 

horses run away with him ; and people 
always perceive whether you drive, or 
whether the horses take the bits in their 
teeth and run. But these talents are quite 
something else when they are subordi- 
nated and serve him ; and we go to Wash- 
ington, or to Westminster Hall, or might 
well go round the world to see a man who 
drives, and is not run away with — a man 
who, in prosecuting great designs, has an 
absolute command of the means of repre- 
senting his ideas, and uses them only to 
express these ; placing facts, placing 
men ; amid the inconceivable levity of 
human beings, never for an instant warped 
from his erectness. There is for every 
man a statement possible of that truth 
which he is most unwilling to receive — 
a statement possible, so broad and so 
pungent that he cannot get away from it, 
but must either bend to it or die of it. 
Else there would be no such word as 
eloquence, which means this. The listener 
cannot hide from himself that something 
has been shown him and the whole world, 
which he did not wish to see ; and, as he 
cannot dispose of it, it disposes of hirn. 
The history of public men and affairs in 
America will readily furnish tragic ex- 
amples of this fatal force. 

For the triumphs of the art somewhat 
more must still be required ; namely, a 
reinforcing of man from events, so as to 
give the double force of reason and des- 
tiny. In transcendent eloquence, there 
was ever some crisis in affairs, such as 
could deeply engage the man to the cause 
he pleads, and draw all this wide power 
to a point. For the explosions and erup- 
tions, there must be accumulations of 
heat somewhere, beds of ignited anthra- 
cite at the centre. And in cases where 
profound conviction has been wTOught, 
the eloquent man is he who is no beauti- 
ful speaker, but who is inwardly drunk 
with a certain belief. It agitates and tears 
him, and perhaps almost bereaves him of 
the power of articulation. Then it rushes 
from him as in short abrupt screams, in 
torrents of meaning. The possession the 
subject has of his mind is so entire, that 
it insures an order of expression which 
is the order of Nature itself, and so the 
order of greatest force, and inimitable by 
any art. And the main distinction between 
him and other well-graced actors is the 
conviction, communicated by every word, 
that bis mind is contemplating a whole, 
and inflamed by the contemplation of the 
whole, and that the words and sentences 
lettered \>7 binif howoyer adnairable, fftll 


from him as unregarded parts of that 
terrible whole which he sees, and which 
he means that you shall see. Add to this 
concentration a certain regnant calmness, 
which, in all the tumult, never utters a 
premature syllable, but keeps the secret 
of its means and method ; and the orator 
stands before the people as a demoniacal 
power to whose miracles they have no 
key. This terrible earnestness makes 
good the ancient superstition of the 
hunter, that the bullet will hit its mark 
which is first dipped in the marksman’s 
blood. 

Eloquence must be grounded on the 
plainest narrative Afterwards, it may 
warm itself until it exhales symbols of 
every kind and colour, speaks only through 
the most poetic forms ; but first and last 
it must still be at bottom a biblical state- 
ment of fact. The orator is thereby an 
orator, that he keeps his feet ever on a 
fact. Thus only is he invincible. No 
gifts, no graces, no power of wit or learn- 
ing or illustration, will make any amends 
for want of this. All audiences are just 
to this point. Fame of voice or of rhe- 
toric will carry people a few times to hear 
a speaker ; but they soon begin to ask, 
what is he driving at ? ” and if this man 
does not stand for anything, he will be 
deserted, A good upholder of anything 
which they believe, a fact-speaker of any 
kind, they will long follow ; but a pause 
in the speaker’s own character is very 
properly a loss of attraction. The 
preacher enumerates his classes of men, 
and I do not find my place therein ; I 
suspect, then, that no man does. Every- 
thing is my cousin ; and whilst ho speaks 
things, I feel that he is touching some of 
my relations, and I am uneasy; but 
whilst he deals in words, we are released 
from attention. If you would lift me, you 
must be on higher ground. If you would 
liberate me, you must be free. If you 
would correct my false view of facts— 
hold up to me the same facts in the truo 
order of thought, and I cannot go back 
from the new conviction. 

The power of Chatham, of Pericles, of 
Luther, rested on this strength of charac- 
ter, which, because it did not and could 
not fear anybody, made nothing of their 
antagonists, and became sometimes ex- 
quisitely provoking and sometimes ter- 
rific to these. 

We are slenderly furnished with anec- 
dotes of these men, nor can we help 
ourselves by those heavy books in which 
their diicc>ur$e» are reported, Some of 



isloqvencb. 


them were writers, like Burke ; but mos. 
of them were not, and no record at all 
adequate to their fame remains. Besides 
what is best is lost — the fiery life of the 
moment. But the conditions for eloquence 
always exist. It is always dying out of 
famous places, and appearing in corners. 
Wherever the popularities meet, wherever 
the fresh moral sentiment, the instinct of 
freedom and duty, come in direct oppo- 
sition to fossil conversation and the thirst 
of gain, the spark will pass. The resist- 
ance to slavery in this country has been 
a fruitful nursery of orators. The natural 
connection by which it drew to itself a 
train of moral reforms, and the slight yet 
sufficient party organisation it offered, 
reinforced the city with new blood from 
the woods and mountains. Wild men, 
John Baptists, Hermit Peters, John 
Knoxes, utter the savage sentiment of 
Nature in the heart of commercial capitals. 
They send us every year some piece of 
aboriginal strength, some tough oak-stick 
of a man who is not to be silenced or 
insulted or intimidated by a mob, because 
he is more mob than they — one who 
mobs the mob — some sturdy countryman 
on whom neither money, nor politeness, 
cor hard words, nor eggs, nor blows, nor 
brickbats, make any impression. He is 
fit to meet the bar-room wits and bullies ; 
he is a wit and a bully himself, and some- 
thing more : ho is a graduate of the 
plough and the stub-hoe, and the bush- 
whacker ; knows all the secrets of swamp 
and snowbank, and has nothing to learn 
of labour or poverty or the rough of farm- 
ing. His hard head went through in 
childhood the drill of Calvinism, with 
text and mortification, so that he stands 
in the New hmgland assembly a purer bit 
of New Englniul than any, and flings his 
Br'.rcasms right and left. He has not only 
the documents in his pocket to answer 
all cavils, and to prove all his positions, 
but he has the eternal reason in his head. 
This man scornfully renounces your civil 
organisations — county, or city, or gover- 
nor, or army — is his own navy and artil- 
lery, judge and jury, legislature and 
executive. He has learned his lessons in 
B bitter school. Yet, if the pupil be of a 
texture to bear it, the best university that 
can be recommended to a man of ideas is 
the gauntlet of the mobs. 

He who will train himself to mastery in 
this science of persuasion must lay the 
emphasis of education, not on popular 
arts, but on character and insight. Let 
him see that his speech is not differenced 


4^7 

from action ; that, when he has spoken 
he has not done nothing, noi done wrong,* 
but has cleared his own skirts, has en- 
gaged himself to wholesome exertion. 
Let him look on opposition as oppor 
tunity. He cannot be defeated or put 
down. There is a principle of resurrec- 
tion in him, an immortality of purpose. 
Men are averse and hostile to give value 
to their sufifrages. It is not the people 
that are in fault for not being convinced, 
but he that cannot convince them. He 
should mould them, armed as ho is with 
the reason and love which are also the 
core of their nature. He is not to neutra- 
lise their opposition, but ha is to convert 
them into fiery apostles and publishers 
of the same wisdom. 

The highest platform of eloquence is the 
moral sentiment. It is what is called 
aflirraative truth, and has the property of 
invigorating the hearer ; and it conveys a 
hint of our eternity, when he feels himself 
addressed on grounds which will remain 
when everything else is taken, and which 
nave no trace of time or place or party. 
Everything hostile is stricken down in tho 
presence of the sentiments ; their majesty 
is felt by the most obdur.ite. It is ob- 
servable that, as soon as one acts for large 
masses, the moral element will and must 
be allowed for, will and must work ; and 
the men least accustomed to appeal to 
these sentiments invariably recall them 
when they address nations. Napoleon, 
even, must accept and use it as ho can. 

It is only to these simple strokes that 
the highest power belongs— when a weak 
human hand touches, point by point, the 
eternal beams and rafters on which the 
whole structure of Nature and society is 
laid. In this tossing sea of delusion we 
feel with our feet the adamant ; in this 
dominion of chance, we find a principle of 
permanence. For I do not accept that 
definition of Isocrates, that the office of 
his art is, to make the great small, and the 
small great ; but I esteem this to be its 
perfection —when the orator sees through 
all masks to the eternal scale of truth, in 
such sort that he can hold up before the 
eyes of men the fact of to-day steadily to 
that standard, thereby making the gre^t 
great, and the small small, which is the 
true way to astonish and to reform man- 
kind. 

All the chief orators of the world have 
been grave men, relying on this reality. 
One thought the philosophers of Demos- 
thenes’s own time found running tlirough 
all his orations— this namely, that “ tirtup 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


428 

secures its own success. “ To stand on 
one’s own feet” Heeren finds the key-note 
to the discourses of Demosthenes, as of 
Chatham, 

Eloquence, like every other art, rests on 
laws the most exact and determinate. It 
is the best speech of the best soul. It 
may well stand as the exponent of all that 
is grand and immortal in the mind. If it 
do not so become an instrument, but as- 
pires to be somewhat of itself, and to 
glitter for show, it is false and weak. In 
its right exercise, it is an elastic, unex- 
hausted power — who has sounded, who 
has estimated it ? — expanding with the ex- 
pansion of our interests and affections. 
Its great masters, whilst they valued every 


help to its attainment, and thought no 
pains too great which contributed in any 
manner to further it — resembling the 
Arabian warrior of fame, who wore seven- 
teen weapons in his belt, and in personal 
combat used them all occasionally — yet 
subordinated all means ; never permitted 
any talent— neither voice, rhythm, poetic 
power, anecdote, sarcasm — to appear for 
show ; but were grave men, who preferred 
their integrity to their talent, and esteemed 
that object for which they toiled, whether 
the prosperity of their country, or the 
laws, or a reformation, or liberty of speech 
or of the press, or letters, or morals, as 
above the whole world, and themselves 
also. 


DOMESTIC LIFE. 


The perfection of the providence for 
childhood is easily acknowledged. The 
care which covers the seed of the tree 
under tough husks and stony cases pro- 
vides for the human plant the mother's 
breast and the father’s house. The size 
of the nestler is comic, and its tiny 
beseeching weakness is compensated per- 
fectly by the happy patronising look of 
the mother, who is a sort of high reposing 
Providence toward it. Welcome to the 
parents the puny struggler, strong in his 
weakness, his little arms more irresistible 
than the soldier’s, his lips touched with 
persuasion which Chatham and Pericles 
in manhood had not. His unaffected 
lamentations when he lifts up his voice on 
high, or, more beautiful, the sobbing 
child — the face all liquid grief, as he tries 
to swallow his vexation— soften all hearts 
to pity, and to mirthful and clamorous 
compassion. The small despot asks so 
little that all reason and all nature are on 
his side. His ignorance is more charming 
than all knowledge, and his little sins 
more bewitching than any virtue. His 
flesh is angels’ flesh, all alive. " Infancy,” 
said Coleridge, ” presents body and spirit 
in unity; the body is all animated.” All 
nay, between his three or four sleeps, he 
coos like a pigeon-house, sputters and 
spurs, and puts on his faces of import- 
ance ; and when he fasts, the little Phari- 
see fails not to sound his trumpet before 
him. By lamplight he delights in shadows 
on the wall; by daylight in yellow and 
scarlet. Carry him out of doors— he is 
overpowered by the light and by the 
extent of natural obiecta and is silent. 


Then presently begins his use of hij 
fingers, and he studies power, the lesson 
of his race. First it appears in no great 
harm, in architectural tastes. Out of 
blocks, threadspools, cards, and checkers, 
he will build his pyramid with the gravity 
of Palladio. With an acoustic apparatus 
of whistle and rattle he explores the laws 
of sound. But chiefly, like his senior 
countrymen, the young American studies 
new and speedier modes of transportation. 
Mistrusting the cunning of his small legs, 
ho wishes to ride on the necks and 
shoulders of all flesh. The small en- 
chanter nothing can withstand — no 
seniority of age, no gravity of character; 
uncles, aunts, grandsires, grandams, fall 
an easy prey : he conforms to nobody, all 
conform to him ; all caper and make 
mouths, and babble, and chirrup to him. 
On the strongest shoulders he rides, and 
pulls the hair of laurelled heads. 

“The childhood,” says Milton, “shows 
the man, as morning shows the day,” The 
child realizes to every man his own ear- 
liest remembrance, and so supplies a 
defect in our education, or enables us to 
live over the unconscious history with a 
sympathy so tender as to be almost 
personal experience. 

Fast— almost too fast for the wistful 
curiosity of the parents, studious of the 
witchcraft of curls and dimples and broken 
words — the little talker grows to a boy, 
He walks daily among wonders ; fire, 
light, darkness, the moon, the stars, the 
furniture of the house, the red tin horse, 
the domestics, who like rude foster-mothera 
befriend and feed him, the faces tbaV 



DOMESTIC LIPE. 


claim his kisses, are all in turn absorbing ; 
yet warm, cheerful, and with good appe- 
tite the little sovereign subdues them 
without knowing it ; the new knowledge 
is taken up into the life of to-day and 
becomes the means of more. The blowing 
rose is a new event; the garden full of 
flowers is Eden over again to the small 
Adam ; the rain, the ice, the frost, make 
epochs in his life. What a holiday is the 
first snow in which Twoshoes can be 
trusted abroad I 

What art can paint or gild any object in 
afterlife with the glow which Nature gives 
to the first baubles of childhood 1 St. 
Peter’s cannot have the magical power 
over us that the red and gold covers of 
our first picture-book possessed. How 
ihe imagination cleaves to the warm 
glories of that tinsel even nowl What 
entertainments make everyday bright and 
short for the fine freshman 1 The street 
is old as Nature ; the persons all have 
their sacredness. His imaginative life 
dresses all things in their best. His fears 
adorn the dark parts with poetry. He 
has heard of wild horses and of bad boys, 
and with a pleasing terror he watches at 
his gate for the passing of those varieties 
of each species. The first ride into the 
country, the first bath in running water, 
the first time the skates are put on, the 
first game out of doors in moonlight, the 
books of the nursery, are new chapters of 
joy. The “Arabian Nights’ Entertain- 
ments,” the “ Seven Champions of Chris- 
tendom,” “ Robinson Crusoe,” and the 
“ Pilgrim’s Progress ” — what mines of 
thought and emotion, what a wardrobe to 
dress the whole world withal, are in this 
encyclopaedia of young thinking ! And so 
by beautiful traits, which, without art, yet 
seem the masterpiece of wisdom, provok- 
ing the love tliat watches and educates 
him, the little pilgrim prosecutes the 
journey through nature which he has thus 
gayly begun. He grows up the ornament 
and joy of the house, which rings to his 
g2ee, to rosy boyhood. 

The household is the home of the man, 
as well as of the child. The events that 
occur therein are more near and affecting 
to us than those which are sought in 
senates and academies. Domestic events 
are certainly our affair. What are called 
public events may or may not be ours. 
If a man wishes to acquaint himself with 
the real history of the world, with the 
spirit of the age, he must not go first to 
tlie State-house or the court-room. The 
subtle spirit of life must be sought in 


423 

facts nearer, II is what is done and 
suffered in the house, in the constitution, 
in the temperament, in the perse nal his- 
tory, that has the profoundest interest for 
us. Fact is better than fiction, if only wa 
could get pure fact. Do you think any 
rhetoric or any romance would get your 
ear from the wise gypsy who could tell 
straight on the real fortunes of the man ; 
who could reconcile your moral character 
and your natural history; who could 
explain your misfortunes, your fevers, 
your debts, your temperament, your 
habits of thought, your tastes, and, in 
every explanation, not sever you from tha 
whole, but unite you to it ? Is it not plain 
that not in senates, or courts, or chambers 
of commerce, but in the dwelling-house 
must the true character and hope ot the 
time be consulted These facts are, to 
be sure, harder to read. It is easier to 
count the census, or compute the square 
extent of a territory, to criticise its polity, 
books, art, than to come to the persons 
and dwellings of men, and read their 
character and hope in their way of life. 
Yet we are always hovering round this 
better divination. In one form or another, 
we are always returning to it. The phy- 
siognomy and phrenology of to-day are 
rash and mechanical systems enough, but 
they rest on everlasting foundations. Wa 
are sure that the sacred form of man is 
not seen in these whimsical, pitiful, and 
sinister masks (masks which we wear and 
which we meet), these bloated and 
shrivelled bodies, bald heads, bead eyes, 
short winds, puny and precarious healths, 
and early deaths. We live ruins amidst 
ruins. The great facts are the near ones. 
The account of the body is to be sought 
in the mind. The history of your fortunes 
is written first in your life. 

Let ,us come, then, out of the public 
square, and enter the domestic precincti 
Let us go to the sitting-room, the table- 
talk, and the expenditure of our contem- 
poraries. An increased consciousness of 
the soul, you say, characterises the period. 
Let us see if it has not only arranged tha 
atoms at the circumference, but the atoms 
at the core. Does the household obey 
an idea ? Do you see the man — his 
form, genius, and aspiration — in his 
economy ? Is that translucent, thorough^ 
lighted ? There should be nothing con- 
founding and conventional in economy, 
but the genius and love of the man so 
conspicuously marked in all his estate, 
that the eye that knew him should read 
his charactei in his propertyi in hii 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDB, 


430 

grounds, ia hiS ornaments, in every 
expense, A man’s money should not 
follow the direction of his neighbour’s 
money, but should represent to him the 
things he'would willingliest do with it. I 
am not one thing and my expenditure 
another. My expenditure is me. That 
our expenditure and our character are 
twain, is the vice of society. 

We ask the price of many things in 
shops and stalls, but some things each 
man buys without hesitation, if it were 
only letters at the post-office, conveyance 
in carriages and boats, tools for his work, 
books that are written to his condition, 
etc. Let him never buy anything else 
than what he wants, never subscribe at 
others’ instance, never give unwillingly. 
Thus a scholar is a literary foundation. 
All his expense is for Aristotle, Fahricius, 
Erasmus, and Petrarch, Do not ask him 
to help with his savings young drapers or 
grocers to stock their shops, or eager 
agents to lobby in legislatures, or join a 
company to build a factory or a fishing 
craft. These things are also to be done, 
but not by such as he. How could such a 
book as Plato's Dialogues have come 
down, but for the sacred savings of 
scholars and their fantastic appropriation 
of them. 

Another man is a mechanical genius, 
an inventor of looms, a builder of ships — 
a ship-building foundation, and could 
achieve nothing if he should dissipate 
himself on books or on horses. Another 
is a farmer—an agricultural foundation; 
another is a chemist— and the same rule 
holds for all. We must not make believe 
with our money, but spend heartily, and 
buy up and not down. 

I am afraid that, so considered, our 
houses will not be found to have unity, | 
and to express the best thought. The 
household, the calling, the friendships, of 
the citizens are not homogeneous. His 
house ought to show us his honest opinion 
of what makes his well-being wffien he 
rests among his kindred, and forgets all 
affectation, compilance, and even exertion 
of will. He brings home whatever com- 
modities and ornaments have for years 
allured his pursuit, and his character must 
be seen in them. But what idea predom- 
inates in our houses ? Thrift first, then 
convenience and pleasure. Take ofif all 
the roofs, from street to street, and wo 
shall seldom find the temple of any 
higher god than Prudence. The progress 
of domestic living has been in cleanliness, 
In ventilation, in health, in decorum, in 


countless means and arts of comfort, la 
the concentration of all the utilities of 
every clime in each house. They are 
arranged for low benefits. The houseo of 
tho rich are confectioners’ shops, where 
we get sweetmeats and wine; the houses 
of the poor are imitations of these to the 
extent of their ability. With these ends 
housekeeping is not beautiful ; it cheers 
and raises neither the husband, the wife, 
nor the child ; neither the host, nor the 
guests; it oppresses w'omen. A house 
kept to the end of prudence is laborious 
without joy ; a house kept to the end 
of display is impossible to all but a 
few women, and their success is dearly 
bought. 

If we look at this matter curiously, it 
becomes dangerous. We need all the force 
of an idea to lift this load ; for the wealth 
and multiplication of conveniences embar- 
rass us, especially in northern climates. 
The shortest enumeration of our wants 
in this rugged climato appals us by the 
multitude of things not easy to be done. 
And if you look at the multitude of particu- 
lars, one would say : Good housekeeping is 
impossible ; order is too precious a thing 
to dwell with men and women. See, in 
families where there is both substance 
and taste, at what expense any favourite 
punctuality is maintained. If the children, 
for example, are considered, dressed, 
dieted, attended, kept in proper company, 
schooled, and at home fostered by the 
parents — then does the hospitality of the 
house suffer; friends are less carefully 
bestowed, the daily table less catered. If 
the hours of meals are punctual, the 
apartments are slovenly. If the linens 
and hangings are clean and fine, and the 
furniture good, the yard, the garden, tho 
fences, are neglected. If all are well 
attended, then must the master and 
mistress be studious of particulars at the 
cost of their own accomplishments and 
growth — or persons are treated as things. 

The difficulties to be overcome must ba 
freely admitted ; they are many and great. 
Nor are they to be disposed of by any 
criticism or amendment of particulars 
taken one at a time, but only by tho 
arrangement of the household to a higher 
end than those to which our dwellings ar6 
usually built and furnished. And is therw 
any calamity more grave, or that more in- 
vokes the best good-will to remove it, than 
this ?— to go from chamber to chamber, 
and see no beauty ; to find in the house- 
mates no aim ; to hear an endless chatter 
and blast ; to compelled to criticise ; to 



DOMBSTIC LIFE. 


Leaf ohly to dissent and to be disgusted ; 
to find no invitation to what is good in us, 
and no receptacle for what is wise — this 
is a great price to pay for sweet bread and 
warm lodging — being defrauded of affinity, 
of repose, of genial culture, and the in- 
most presence of beauty. 

It is a suflEicient accusation of our ways 
of living, and certainly ought to open our 
•ars to every good-niirided reformer, that 
our idea of domestic well-being now needs 
v;ealtli to execute it. Give me the means, 
says the wife, and your house shall not 
annoy your taste nor waste your time. 
On hearing this, we understand how these 
Means have come to be so omnipotent on 
earth. And indeed the love of wealth 
seems to grow chiefly out of the root of 
the love of the beautiful. The desire of 
gold is not for gold. It is not the love of 
much wheat and wool and household-stuff. 
It is the means of freedom and benefit. 
We scorn shifts ; we desire the elegance of 
munificence ; we desire at least to put no 
stint or limit on our parents, relatives, 
guests, or dependents ; we desire to play 
the benefactor and the prince with our 
townsmen, with the stranger at the gate, 
With the bard, or the beauty, with the 
tnan or woman of worth, who alights at 
our door. How can we do this, if the 
wants of each day imprison us in lucra- 
tive labours, and constrain us to a con- 
tinual vigilance least we be betrayed into 
expense ? 

Give ns wealth, and the home shall exist. 
But that is a very imperfect and inglorious 
solution of the problem, and therefore no 
solution. “ Give us wealth” You ask too 
much. Few have wealth ; but all must 
have a home. Men are not born rich; 
und in getting wealth, the man is generally 
sacrificed, and often is sacrificed without 
accpiirlng wealth at last. Besides, that 
cannot be the right answer — there are 
objections to wealth. Wealth is a shift. 
The wise man angles with himself only, 
and with no meaner bait. Our whole use 
of wealth needs revision and reform. 
Generosity docs not consist in giving 
money or money’s worth. Those so- 
called goods are only the shadow of good. 
To give money to a sufferer is only a come- 
off. It is only a postponement of the real 
payment, a bribe paid for silence — a credit- 
system in which a paper promise to pay 
answers for the time instead of liquidation. 
We owe to man higher succours than food 
and fire. We owe to man man, If he is sick, 
is unable, is mean-spirited and odious, it is 
because there is so much of his nature 


43 * 

which is unlawfully wltL^iOlden from him. 
He should be visited in this his prison with 
rebuke to the evil demons, with manly 
encouragement, with no mean-spirited 
offer of condolence because you have not 
money, or mean offer of money as the 
utmost benefit, but by your heroism, your 
purity, and your faith. You are to bring 
with you that spirit which is understand- 
ing, health and self-help. To offer him 
money in lieu of these is to do him the 
same wrong as when the bridegroom offers 
his betrothed virgin a sum of money to 
release him from his engagements. The 
great depend on their heart, not on their 
purse. Genius and virtue, like diamonds, 
are best plain-set — set in lead, set in 
poverty. The greatest man in history was 
the poorest. How was it with the captains 
and sages of Greece and Rome, with 
Socrates, with Epaminondas? Aristides 
was made general receiver of Greece, to 
collect the tribute which each state was to 
furnish against the barbarian. “ Poor,’* 
says Plutarch, “ when he set about it, poorer 
when he had finished it.” How was it with 
i^£milius and Cato ? What kind of house 
was kept by Paul and John — by Milton 
and Marvell — by Samuel Johnson — by 
Samuel Adams in Boston, and Jean Paul 
Richter at Baireuth ? 

1 think it plain that this voice of com- 
munities and ages, “Give us wealth, and 
; the good household shall exist,” is vicious, 
and leaves the whole difficulty untouched. 
It is better, certainly, in this form, “ Give 
us your labour, and the household begins.” 
I see now how serious labour, the labour 
of all and every day, is to be avoided ; 
and many things betoken a revolution of 
opinion and practice in regard to manual 
labour that may go far to aid our practical 
inquiry. Another age may divide the 
manual labour of the world more equally 
on all the members of society, and so 
make the labours of a few houru avail to 
the wants and add to the vigour of the 
man. But the reform that applies itself 
to the household must not be partial. It 
must correct the whole sysvem of our 
social living. It must come with plain 
living and high thinking; it must break 
up caste, and pat domestic service on 
another foundation. It must coma in 
connection with a true acceptance by each 
man of his vocation — not chosen by his 
parents or friends, but by his genius, with 
earnestness and love. 

Nor is this redress so hopeless as it 
seems. Certainly, if we begin by reform- 
ing particulars of our present ay«tem« 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


43fl 

correcting a few evils and letting the rest 
stand, we shall soon give up in de^air. 
For our social forms are very far from 
truth and equity. But the way to set the 
axe at the root of the tree, is to raise our 
aim. Let us understand, then, that a 
house should bear witness in all its 
economy that human culture is the end to 
which it is built and garnished. It stands 
there under the sun and moon to ends 
analogous and not less noble than theirs. 
It is not for festivity, it is not for sleep : 
but the pine and the oak shall gladly 
descend from the mountains to uphold the 
roof of man as faithful and necessary as 
themselves ; to be the shelter always open 
to good and true persons— a hall which 
shines with sincerity, brows ever tranquil, 
and a demeanour impossible to discon- 
cert ; whose inmates know what they 
want; who do not ask your house how 
theirs should be kept. They have aims : 
they cannot pause for trifles. The diet of 
the house does not create its order, but 
knowledge, character, action, absorb so 
much life and yield so much entertain- 
ment that the refectory has ceased to be 
so curiously studied. With a change of 
aim has followed a change of the whole 
scale by which men and things were wont 
to be measured. Wealth and poverty are 
seen for what they are. It begins to be i 
seen that the poor are only they who feel 
poor, and poverty consists in feeling poor. 
The rich, as we reckon them, and among 
them the very rich, in a true scale would 
be found very indigent and ragged. The 
great make us feel, first of all, the indif- 
ference of circumstances. They call into 
activity the higher perceptions, and subdue 
the low habits of comfort and luxury ; but 
the higher perceptions find their objects 
everywhere : only the low habits need 
palaces and banquets. 

Let a man, then, say, My House is here 
in the county, for the culture of the 
county — an eating-house and sleeping- 
house for travellers it shall be, but it shall 
be much more. I pray you, O excellent 
wife, not to cumber yourself and me to get 
a rich dinner for this man or this woman | 
who has alighted at our gate, nor a bed- 
chamber made ready at too great a cost. 
These things, if they are curious in, 
they can get for a dollar at any village. 
But let this stranger, if he will, in your 
looks, in your accent and behaviour, read 
your heart and earnestness, your thought 
and will, which we canhot buy at any 



sparely and sleep hard, in order to behold. 
Certainly, let the board be spread and let 
the bed be dressed for the traveller ; but 
let not the emphasis of hospitality lie in 
these things. Honour to the house where 
they are simple to the verge of hardship, 
so that there the intellect is awake and 
reads the laws of the universe, the soul 
worships truth and love, honour and 
courtesy flow into all deeds. 

There was never a country in the world 
which could so easily exhibit this heroism 
as ours ,* never any where the State has 
made such efficient provision for pcpular 
education, where intellectual entertain- 
ment is so within reach of youthful am- 
bition. The poor man’s son is educated. 
There is many a humble house in every 
city, in every town, where talent and 
taste, and sometimes genius, dwell with 
poverty and labour. Who has not seen, 
and who can see unmoved, under a low 
roof, the eager, blushing boys discharging 
as they can their household chores, and 
hastening into the sitting-room to the 
study of to-morrow’s merciless lesson, 
yet stealing time to read one chapter 
more of the novel hardly smuggled into 
the tolerance of father and mother- 
atoning for the same by some pages of 
Plutarch or Goldsmith ; the warm sym- 
pathy with which they kindle each other 
in school-yard, or in barn or wood-shed, 
with scraps of poetry or song, with phrases 
of the last oration, or mimicry of the 
orator; the youthful criticism, on Sunday, 
of the sermons ; the school declamation 
faithfully rehearsed at home, soinetimea 
to the fatigue, sometimes to the admira- 
tion of sisters ; the first solitary joys of 
literary vanity, when the translation or 
the theme has been completed, sitting 
alone near the top of the house; the 
cautious comparison of the attractive 
advertisement of the arrival of Macready, 
Booth, or Kemble, or of the discourse of 
a well-known speaker, with tlic expense 
of the entertainment; the affectionate 
delight with which they greet the return of 
each one after the early separations which 
school or business require ; the foresight 
with which, during such absences, they 
hive the honey which opportunity offers, 
for the ear and imagination of the othera; 
and the unrestrained glee with which they 
disburden themselves of their early men- 
tal treasures when the holidays bring 
them again together ? What is the hoop 
that holds them stanch ? It is the iron 
band of poverty, of necessity, of austerity, 
which, excluding them from the sensual 



DOMESTIC LIFE, 


enjoyments which make other boys too 
early old, has directed their activity in 
safe and right channels, and made them, 
despite themselves, reverers of the grand, 
the beautiful, and the good. Ah 1 short- 
sighted students of books, of Nature, and 
of man ! too happy, could they know their 
advantages. They pine for freedom from 
that mild parental yoke ; they sigh for 
fine clothes, for rides, for the theatre, and 
premature freedom and dissipation, which 
otliers possess. Woe to them, if their 
wishes were crowned ! The angels that 
dwell with them, and are weaving laurels 
of life for their youthful brows, are Toil, 
and Want, and Truth, and Mutual Faith. 

In many parts of true economy a cheer- 
ing lesson may be learned from the mode 
of life and manners of the later Romans, 
as described to us in the letters of the 
younger Pliny. Nor can I resist the 
temptation of quoting so trite an instance 
as the noble housekeeping of Lord Falk- 
land in Clarendon: “His house being 
within little more than ten miles from 
Oxford, ho contracted familiarity and 
friendship with the most polite and accu- 
rate men of that University, who found 
Buch an immeiiscness of wit, and such a 
solidity of judgment in him, so infinite a 
fancy, bound in by a most logical ratioci- 
nation, such a vast knowledge that he 
was not ignorant in any thing, yet such an 
excessive humility, as it he had known 
nothing, that they frequently resorted 
and dwelt with him, as in a college situa- 
ted in a purer air ; so that his house was 
a university in a less volume, whither 
they came, not so much for repose as 
study, and to examine and refine those 
grosser propositions which laziness and 
consent made current in vulgar conversa- 
tion.” 

I honour that man whose ambition it is, 
not to win laurels in the state or the army; 
not to bo a jurist or a naturalist, not to 
be a poet or a commander, but to be a 
master of living well, and to administer 
the offices of master or servant, of hus- 
band, father, and friend. But it requires j 
as much breadth of power for this as for ! 
those other functions — as much, or more 
— and the reason for the failure is the 
same. I think the vice of our housekeep- 
ing is, that it does not hold man sacred. 
The vice of government, the vice of edu- j 
cation, the vice of religion, is one with 
that of private life. 

In the old fables; we used to read of a 
cloak brought from fairy-land as a gift for 
the fairest and purest in Prince Arthur’s 


433 

I court. It was to be her prize whom it 
I would fit. Evo.:y one was eager to try it 
on, but it would fit nobody: for one it 
was a world too wide, for the next it 
dragged on the ground, and for the third 
it shrunk to a scarf. They, of course, 
said that the devil was in the mantle, for 
really the truth was in the mantle, and 
was exposing the ugliness which each 
would fain conceal. All drew back with 
terror from the garment. The innocent 
Genelas alone could wear it. In like 
manner, every man is provided in his 
thought with a measure of man which he 
applies to every passenger. Unhappily, 
not one in many thousands comes up to 
the stature and proportions of the model. 
Neither does the measurer himself, 
neither do the people in the street ; neither 
do the select individuals whom he ad- 
mires — the heroes of the race. When he 
inspects them critically, he discovers that 
their aims are low, that they are too 
quickly satisfied. He observes the swift- 
ness with which life culminates, and the 
humility of the expectations of the 
greatest part of men. To each occurs, 
soon after the age of puberty, some event, 
or society, or way of living, which becomes 
the crisis of life, and the chief fact in 
their history. In woman, it is love and 
marriage (which is more reasonable) ; 
and yet it is pitiful to date and measure 
all the facts and sequel of an unfolding 
life from such a youthful, and generally 
inconsiderate, period as the age of court- 
ship and marriage. In men, it is their 
place of education, choice of an employ- 
ment, settlement in a town, or removal 
to the East or to the West, or some 
other magnified trifle, which makes the 
meridian moment, and all the after years 
and actions only derive interest from their 
relation to that. Hence it comes that we 
I soon catch the trick of each man’s con- 
versation, and, knowing his two or three 
main facts, anticipate what he thinks of 
each new topic that rises. It is scarcely 
less perceivable in educated men, so 
called, than in the uneducated. I have 
seen finely endowed men at college fes- 
tivals, ten, twenty years after they had 
left the halls, returning, as it seemed, 
the same boys who went away. The 
same jokes pleased, the same straws 
tickled; the manhood and offices they 
brought thither at this return seemed 
mere ornamental masks : underneath they 
were boys yet. We never come to bo 
citizens of the world, but are still villa- 
gers, who think that every thing in tbeif 



434 SOCIETY AND SOLITUDB. 


petty town is a little superior to the same 
thing any where else. In each the cir- 
cumstance signalised differs, but in each 
it is made the coals of an ever-burning 
egotism. In one, it was his going to sea ; in 
a second, the difficulties he combated in 
going to college ; in a third, his journey to 
the West, or his voyage to Canton ; in a 
fourth, his coming out of the Quaker 
Society ; in a fifth, his new diet and 
regimen ; in a sixth, his coming forth 
from the abolition organisations ; and in 
R seventh, his going into them. It is aj 
life of toys and trinkets. We are too 
easily pleased. 

. I think this sad result appears in the 
manners. The men we see in each other 
do not give us the image and likeness of 
man. The men we see are whipped 
through the world ; they are harried, 
wrinkled, anxious ; they all seem the 
hacks of some invisible riders. How 
seldom do we behold tranquillity 1 We 
have never yet seen a man. We do not 
know the majestic manners that belong to 
him, which appease and exalt the be- 
holder. There are no divine persons 
with us, and the multitude do not hasten 
to be divine. And yet we hold fast, all 
our lives long, a faith in a better life, in 
better men, in clean and noble relations, 
notwithstanding our total inexperience of 
a true society. Certainly, this was not the 
intention of nature, to produce, with all 
this immense expenditure of means and 
power, so cheap and humble a result. 
The aspirations in the heart after the 
good and true teach us better — nay, the 
men themselves suggest a better life. 

Every individual nature has its own 
beauty. One is struck in every company, 
at every fireside, with the riches of nature, 
when he hears so many new tones, all 
musical; sees in each person original 
manners, which have a proper and pecu- 
liar charm, and reads new expressions of 
face. He perceives that nature has laid 
for each the foundations of a divine 
building, if the soul will build thereon. 
There is no face, no form, which one can- 
not in fancy associate with great power of 
intellect or with generosity of soul. In 
our experience, to be sure, beauty is not, 
AS it ought to be, the dower of man and of 
woman as invariably as sensation. Beauty 
is, even in the beautiful, occasional— or, 
as one has said, culminating and perfect 
only a single moment, before which it is 
nnripo, and after which it is on the wane. 
But beauty is never quite absent from our 
•yei. Every face, every figure, luggesti 


its own right Ahd Sotiod eslatd. Out 
friends are not their own highest form. 
But let the hearts they have agitated wit- 
ness w'hat power has lurked in the traits 
of these structures of clay that pass and 
repass us ! The secret power of form 
over the imagination and affections 
transcends all our philosophy. The first 
glance we meet may satisfy us that matter 
is the vehicle of higher powers than it? 
own, and that no laws of line or surfac e 
can ever account for the inexhaustiblo 
expressiveness of form. Wo see heads 
that turn on the pivot of the spine~no 
more; and we see heads that seem to 
turn on a pivot as deep as the axle of the 
world — so slow, and lazily, and great, 
they move. We see on the lip of our 
companion, the presence or absence of 
the great masters of thought and poetry 
to his mind. We read in his brow, on 
meeting him after many years, that he is 
where we left him, or that he has made 
great strides. 

Whilst thus nature and the hints we 
draw from man suggest a true and lofty 
life, a household equal to the beauty and 
grandeur of this world, especially we learn 
the same lessons from those best relations 
to individual men which the heart is 
always prompting us to form, Happy 
will that house be in which the relations 
are formed from character, after the high- 
est, and not after the lowest order ; the 
house in which character marries, and 
not confusion and a miscellany of un- 
I avowable motives. Then shall marriage 
be a covenant to secure to either party 
the sweetness and honour of being a calm, 
continuing, inevitable benefactor to the 
other. Yes, and the sufficient reply to 
the sceptic who doubts the competence 
of man to elevate and to be elevated is 
in that desire and power to stand in joyful 
and ennobling intercourse with indi- 
viduals, which makes the faith and the 
practice of all reasonable men. 

The ornament of a house is the friends 
who frequent it. There is no event greater 
in life than the appearance of new persons 
about our hearth, except it be the progress 
of the character which draws them. It 
has been finely added by Landor to hi* 
definition of the great man, “ It is he who 
can call together the most select company 
when it pleases him.” A verse of the old 
Greek Menander remains, which runs in 
translation 

” Not on the store of sprightly wlnSi 
Nor plenty of delicious maau« 



DOMESTIC LIFE. 


435 


Though generous Nature did design 
To court us with perpetual treats— 

'T is not on these we for content depend, 
So much as on the shadow of a friend.” 

It is the happiness which, when it is 
truly known, postpones all other satisfac- 
tions, and makes politics and commerce 
and churches cheap. For we figure to 
ourselves — do wo not ? — that when men 
shall meet as they should, as states meet 
— each a benefactor, a shower of falling 
stars, so rich with deeds, with thoughts, 
with so much accomplishment — it shall 
be the festival of nature, which all things 
symbolise ; and perhaps Love is only the 
highest symbol of Friendship, as all other 
things seem symbols of love. In the 
progress of each man’s character, his ] 
relations to the best men, which at first 
seem only the romances of youth, acquire 
a graver importance ; and he will have 
learned the lesson of life who is skilful in 
the ethics of friendship. 

I3eyond its primary ends of the conjugal, 
parental, and amicable relations, the 
household should cherish the beautiful 
arts and the sentiment of veneration. 

I. Whatever brings the dweller into a 
finer life, what educates his eye, or ear, 
or hand, whatever purifies and enlarges 
him, may well find place there. And 
yet let him not think that a property in 
beautiful objects is necessary to his appre- 
hension of them, and seek to turn his 
house into a museum. Rather let the 
noble practice of the Greeks find place in 
our society, and let the creations of the 
plastic arts bo collected with care in gal- 
leries by the piety and taste of the people, 
and yielded as freely as the sunlight to 
all. Meantime, be it remembered, we 
are artists ourselves, and competitors, 
each one, with Phidias and Raphael in 
the production of what is graceful or 
grand. The fountain of beauty is the heart, 
and every generous thought illustrates 
the walls of your chamber. Why should 
wa owe our power of attracting our friends 
to pictures and vases, to cameos and 
architecture ? Why should we convert 
ourselves into showmen and appendages 
to our fine houses and our works of art ? 
If by love and nobleness we take up into 
ourselves the beauty we admire, we shall 
spend it again on all around us. The man, 
the woman, needs not the embellishment 
of canvas and marble, whose every act is 
a subject for the sculptor, and to whose 
eye the gods and nymphs never appear 
ancient ; for they know by heart the whole 
instinct of majesty, 


I do not undervalue the fine instruction 
which statues and pictures give. But I 
think the public museum in each town 
will one day relieve the private houses of 
this charge of owning and exhibiting them, 
I go to Rome and see on the walls of the 
Vatican the Transfiguration, painted by 
Raphael, reckoned the first picture in 
the world ,* or in the Sistine Chapel I see 
the grand sibyls and prophets, painted in 
fresco by Michael Angelo — which have 
every day now for three hundred years 
inflamed the imagination and exalted the 
piety of what vast multitudes of men of all 
nations I I wish to bring home to my 
children and my fr.ends copies of these 
admirable forms, which I can find in the 
shops of the engravers ; but I do not 
wish the vexation of owning them. I 
wish to find in my own town a library 
and museum which is the property of the 
town, where I can deposit this precious 
treasure, where I and my children can see 
it from time to time, and where it has its 
proper place among hundreds of such 
donations from other citizens vvlio have 
brought thither whatever articles they 
have judged to be in their nature rather a 
public than a private property. 

A collection of this kind, the property 
of each town, would dignify the town, and 
we should love and respect our neighbours 
more. Obviously, it would be easy for 
every town to discharge this truly munici- 
pal duty. Every one of us would gladly 
contribute his share ; and the more gladly, 
the more considerable the institution had 
become. 

2 . Certainly, not aloof from this hemvaga 
to beauty, but in strict connection there- 
with, the house will come to be esteemed 
a Sanctuary. The language of a ruder ago 
has given to common law the maxim that 
every man’s house is his castle : the pro- 
gress of truth will make every house a 
shrine. Will not man one day open his 
eyes and see how dear ho is to the soul of 
Nature— how near it is to him ? Will ha 
not see, throiigli all he miscalls accident, 
that Law prevails for ever and ever ; that 
his private being is a part of it ; that its 
home is in his own unsound heart ; 
that his economy, his labour, his good 
and bad fortune, his health and manners, 
are all a curious and exact demonstration 
in miniature of the genius of the Eternal 
Providence ? When he perceives the law, 
he ceases to despond. Whilst he sees it, 
every thought and act is raised, and be- 
comes an act of religion. Does the con- 
secration of Sunday confess th,e desecr^l* 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE, 


tion of the entire week ? Does the con- 
secration of the church confess the pro- 
fanation of the house? Let us read the 
incantation backward. Let the man stand 
on his feet. Let religion cease to be 
occasional ; and the pulses of thought 
that go to the borders of the universe, let 
them proceed from the bosom of the 
Household. 

These are the consolations— these are 
the ends to which the household is insti- 
tuted and the rooftree stands. If these 
are sought, and in any good degree 
attained, can the State, can commerce, 
can climate, can the labour of many for 
one, yield any thing better, or half as 


good? Besides these aims, Society is 
weak and the State an intrusion. I think 
that the heroism which at this day would 
make on us the impression of Epaminondas 
and Phocion must be that of a domestic 
conqueror. He who shall bravely and 
gracefully subdue this Gorgon of Conven- 
tion and Fashion, and show men how to 
lead a clean, handsome, and heroic life 
amid the beggarly elements of our cities 
and villages ; whoso shall teach me how 
to eat my meat and take my repose, and 
deal with men, without any shame fol- 
lowing, will restore the life of man to 
splendour, and make his own name dear 
to all history, 


FARMING. 


The glory of the farmer is that, in the 
division of labours, it is his part to create. 
All trade rests at last on his primitive 
activity. He stands close to nature; he 
obtains from the earth the bread and the 
meat. The food which was not, he causes 
to be. The first farmer was the first 
man, and all historic nobility rests on 
possession and use of land. Men do not 
like hard work, but every man has an 
exceptional respect for tillage, and a feel- 
ing that this is the original calling of his 
race, and that he himself is only excused 
from it by some circumstance which made 
him delegate it for a time to other hands. 
If he have not some skill which recom- 
mends him to the farmer, some product 
for which the farmer will give him corn, 
he must himself return into his due place 
among the planters. And the profession 
has in all eyes its ancient charm, as 
standing nearest to God, the first cause. 

Then the beauty of nature, the tran- 
quillity and innocence of the countryman, 
his independence, and his pleasing arts 
— the care of bees, of poultry, of sheep, of 
cows, the dairy, the care of hay, of fruits, 
of orchards, and forests, and the reaction 
of these on the workman, in giving him a 
strength and plain dignity, like the face 
and manners of nature, all men acknow- 
ledge. All men keep the farm in reserve 
as an asylum where, in case of mischance, 
to hide their poverty — or a solitude, if 
they do not succeed in society. And who 
knows how many glances of remorse are 
turned this way from the bankrupts of 
trade, from mortified pleaders in courts 
and Senates, or from the victims of idle- 
ness and pleasure? Poisoned by town 


life and town vices, the sufferer resolves; 
“ Well, my children, whom I have injured, 
shall go back to the land, to be recruited 
and cured by that which should have 
been my nursery, and now shall bo theii 
hospital.” 

The farmer’s office is precise and im- 
portant, but you must not try to paint 
him in rose-colour ; you cannot make 
pretty compliments to fate and gravitation, 
whose minister he is. He represents the 
necessities. It is the beauty of the great 
economy of the world that makes his 
comeliness. He bends to the order of 
the seasons, the weather, the soils and 
crops, as the sails of a ship bend to the 
wind. He represents continuous hard 
labour, year in, year out, and small gains. 
He is a slow person, limed to nature, and 
not to city watches. He takes the pace 
of seasons, plants, and chemistry. Nature 
never hurries : atom by atom, little by 
little, she achieves her work. The lesson 
one learns in fishing, yachting, hunting 
or planting, is the manners of Nature , 
patience with the delays of wind and sun, 
delays of the seasons, bad weather, excess 
or lack of water — patience with the slow- 
ness of our feet, with the parsimony of 
our strength, with the largeness of sea 
and land we must traverse, &c. The 
farmer times himself to Nature, and 
acquires that livelong patience which 
belongs to her. Slow, narrow man, his 
rule is, that the earth shall feed and 
clothe him; and he must wait for his 
crop to grow. His entertainments, hia 
liberties, and bis spending must be on a 
farmer’s scale, and not on a merchant’s. 
It were as false for farmers to use a 



FARMING, 


wholesale and massy expense, as for 
States to use a minute economy. But if 
thus pinched on one side, he has compen- 
satory advantages. Ho is permanent, 
clings to his land as the rocks do. In 
the town where I live, farms remain in the 
same families for seven and eight genera- 
tions ; and most of the first settlers (in 
1635)1 should they reappear on the farms 
to-day, would find their own blood and 
names still in possession. And the like , 
fact holds in the surrounding towns. ^ 

This hard work will always be done by | 
one kind of man ; not by scheming specu- ' 
laitors, nor by soldiers, nor professors, 
nor readers of Tennyson ; but by men of ' 
endurance — deep-chested, long-winded, 
tough, slow and sure, and timely. The 
farmer has a great health, and the appe- 
tite of health, and means to his end : he 
has broad lands for his home, wood to 
burn great fires, plenty of plain food ; his 
milk, at least, is unwatered ; and for 
sleep, he has cheaper and better and 
more of it than citizens. 

He has grave trusts confided to him. 
In the great household of Nature, the 
farmer stands at the door of the bread- 
room, and weighs to each his loaf. It is 
for him to say whether men shall marry 
or not. Early marriages and the number 
of births are indissolubly connected with 
abundance of food ; or, as Burke said, 
“ Man breeds at the mouth.” Then he is 
the Board of Quarantine. The farmer is 
a hoarded capital of health, as the farm is 
the capital of wealth ; and it is from him 
that the health and power, moral and in- 
tellectual, of the cities came. The city 
is always recruited from the country. 
The men in cities who are the centres of 
energy, the driving-wheels of trade, poli- 
tics, or practical arts, and the women of 
beauty and genius, are the children or 
grandchildren of farmers, and are spend- 
ing the energies which their fathers’ 
hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty 
furrows, in poverty, necessity, and dark- 
ness. 

He is the continuous benefactor. He 
who digs a well, constructs a stone foun- 
tain, plants a grove of trees by the road- 
side, plants an orchard, builds a durable 
house, reclaims a swamp, or so much as 
puts a stone seat by the wayside, makes 
the land so far lovely and desirable, 
makes a fortune which he cannot cari7 
away with, but which is useful to his 
country long afterwards. The man that 
works at home helps society at large with 
•omewhat more of certainty than be who 


137 

I devotes himself to chailties. If it be true 
j that, not by votes of pclitical parties, but 
1 by the eternal laws of political economy, 

! slaves are driven out of a slave Staie as 
fast as it is surrounded by free States, 
then the true abolitionist is the farmer, 
who, heedless of laws and constitutions, 
stands all day in the field, investing his 
labour in the land, and making a product 
with which no forced labour can com- 
pete. 

We commonly say that the rich man 
can speak the truth, can afford honesty, 
can afford independence of opinion and 
action — and that is the theory of nobility. 
But it is the rich man in the true sense, 
that is to say, not the man of large income 
and large expenditure, but solely the man 
whose outlay is less than his income, 
and is steadily kept so. 

In English factories, the boy that 
watches the loom, to tie the thread when 
the wheel stops to indicate that a thread 
is broken, is called a minder. And in 
this great factory of our Copernican globe, 
shifting its slides ; rotating its constella- 
tions, times, and tides ; bringing now the 
day of planting, then of watering, then of 
weeding, then of reaping, then of curing 
and storing— the farmer is the minder. 
His machine is of colossal proportions — 
the diameter of the water-wheel, the arms 
of the levers, the power of the battery, 
are out of all mechanic measure — and it 
takes him long to understand its pads 
and its working. This pump never 
“sucks,’' these screws are never loose; 
this machine is never out of gear; the 
vat and piston, wheels and tires, never 
wear out, but are self-repairing. 

Who are the farmer’s servants ? Not 
the Irish, nor the coolies, but Geology 
and Chemistry, the quarry of the air, the 
water of the brook, the lightning of the 
cloud, tile castings of the worm, the 
plough of the frost. Long before he was 
born, the sun of ages decomposed the 
rocks, mellowed his land, soaked it with 
light and heat, covered it with vegetable 
film, then with forests, and accumulated 
the sphagnum whose decays made the 
peat of his meadow. 

Science has shown the great circles in 
which nature works ; the manner in which 
marine plants balance the marine animals, 
as the land plants supply the oxygen 
which the animals consume, and the 
animals the carbon which the planti 
absorb. These activities are incessant. 
Nature works on a method of all for each 
and each for all. The strain that is madf 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE, 


438 

on one point bears on every arch and 
foundation of the structure. There is a 
perfect solidarity. You cannot detach an 
atom from its holdings, or strip off from 
it the electricity, gravitation, chemic 
affinity, or the relation to light and heat, 
and leave the atom bare. No, it brings 
with it its universal ties. 

JNature, iiKe a cautious testator, ties 
Dp her estate so as not to bestow it all on 
DUO generation, but has a forelooking 
tenderness and equal regard to the next 
and the next, and the fourth, and the 
fortieth age. 

There lie the inexhaustible magazines. 
The eternal rocks, as we call them, have 
held their oxygen or lime undiminislied, 
entire, as it was. No particle of oxygen 
can rust or wear, but has the same energy 
as on the first morning. The good rocks, 
those patient waiters, say to him : “ We 
have the sacred power as we received it. 
We have not failed of our trust, and now 
— when in our immense day the hour is at 
last struck — take the gas we have hoarded ; 
mingle it with water ; and let it be free to 
grow in plants and animals, and obey tlie 
thought of man.” 

The earth works for him ; the earth is a 
machine which yields almost gratuitous 
service to every application of intellect. 
Every plant is a manufacturer of soil. In 
the stomach of the plant development 
begins. The tree can draw on the whole 
air, the whole earth, on all the rolling 
main. The plant is all suction-pipe — im- 
bibing from the ground by its root, from 
the air by its leaves, with all its might. 

The air works for him. The atmosphere, 
B sharp solvent, drinks the essence and 
spirit of every solid on the globe—a men- 
struum which melts the mountains into it, 
Air is matter subdued by heat. As the sea 
is the grand receptacle of all rivers, so the 
air is the receptacle from which all things 
spring, and into which they all return. 
The invisible and creeping air takes form 
and solid mass. Our senses are sceptics, 
and believe only the impression of the 
moment, and do not believe the chemical 
fact that these huge mountain-chains are 
made up of gases and rolling wind. But 
Nature is as subtle as she is strong. She 
turns her capital day by day ; deals never 
with dead, but ever with quick subjects. 
All things are flowing, even those that 
seem immovable. The adamant is always 
passing into smoke. The plants imbibe 
the materials which they want from the air 
and the ground. They burn, that is, exhale ^ 
and decompose their own bodies into the I 


air and earth again. The animal burns, 
or undergoes the like perpetual consump- 
tion. The earth burns — the mountains 
burn and decompose — slower, but inceiii- 
santly. It is almost inevitable to push the 
generalization up into higher parts of 
nature, rank over rank into sentient beings. 
Nations burn with internal fire of thought 
and affection, which wastes while it works. 
We shall find finer combustion and finer 
fuel. Intellect is a fire : rash and pitiless 
it melts this wonderful bone-house which 
is called man. Genius even, as it is the 
greatest good, is the greatest harm. 
Whilst all thus burns — the universe in a 
blaze kindled from the torch of the sun — • 
it needs a perpetual tempering, a phlegm 
a sleep, atmospheres of azote, deluges of 
water, to check the fury of the conflagra- 
tion ; a hoarding to check the spending ; a 
centripetence equal to the centrifugenco ; 
and this is invariably supplied. 

The railroad dirt cars are good excava- 
tors ; but there is no porter like Gravita- 
tion, who will bring down any weights 
which man cannot carry, and if be wants 
aid, knows wliere to find his fellow- 
labourers. Water works in masses, and 
sets its irresistible shoulder to your mills 
or your ships, or transports vast boulders 
of rock in its iceberg a thousand miles. 
But its far greater power depends on iti 
talent of becoming little, and entering tha 
smallest holes and pores. By this agency, 
carrying in solution elements needful to 
every plant, the vegetable world exists. 

But as I said, we must not paint the 
farmer in rose-colour. Whilst these grand 
energies have wrought for him, and made 
his task possible, he is habitually engaged 
in small economies, and is taught the 
power that lurks in petty things. Great is 
the force of a few simple arrangements ; 
for instance, the powers of a fence. On 
the prairie you wander a hundred miles 
and hardly find a stick or a stone. At rare 
intervals, a thin oak opening has been 
spared, and every such section has been 
long occupied. But the farmer manages 
to procure wood from far, puts up a rail 
fence, and at once the seeds sprout and 
th ' oaks rise. It was only browsing and 
fire which had kept them down. Plant 
fruit-trees by the roadside, and their fruit 
will never be allowed to ripen. Draw a 
pine fence about them, and for fifty years 
they mature for the owner their delicate 
fruit. There is a great deal of enchant- 
ment in a chestnut rail or picketed pine 
boards. 

Nature gufjgests every eqgnapmical e?-* 



FARMING. 


pcdient somewhere on a great scale. Set 
out a pine-tree, and it dies in the first 
year, or lives a poor spindle. But Nature 
drops a pine-cone in Mariposa, and it 
lives fifteen centuries, grows three or 
four hundred feet high, and thirty in 
diameter — grows in a grove of giants, like 
a colonnade of Thebes. Ask the tree how 
it was done. It did not grow on a ridge, 
but in a basin, where it found deep soil, 
cold enough and dry enough for the pine ; 
defended itself from the sun by growing 
in groves, and from the wind by the walls 
of the mountain. The roots that shot 
deepest, and the stems of happiest ex- 
posure, drew the nourishment from the 
rest, until the less thrifty perished and 
manured the soil for the stronger, and the 
mammoth Sequoias rose to their enormous 
proportions. The traveller who saw them 
remembered his orchard at home, where 
every year, in the destroying wind, his 
forlorn trees pined like suffering virtue. 
In September, when the pears hang 
heaviest, and are taking from the sun 
their gay colours, comes usually a gusty 
day which shakes the whole garden, and 
throws down the heaviest fruit in bruised 
heaps. The planter took the hint of the 
Sequoias, built a high wall, or — better — 
surrounded the orchard with a nursery of 
birches and evergreens. Thus he had the 
mountain basin in miniature ; and his 
pears grow to the size of melons, and the 
vines beneath them ran an eighth of a 
mile. But this shelter creates a new 
climate. The wall that keeps off the 
cold wind. The high wall reflecting the 
heat back on the soil gives that acre a 
quadruple share of sunshine, 

“Enclobing in the garden square 
A dead and standing pool of air,*’ 

and makes a little Cuba within it, whilst all 
without is Labrador. 

The chemist comes to his aid every year 
by following out some new hint drawn from 
nature, and now affirms that this dreary 
space occupied by the farmer is needless : 
he will concentrate his kitchen garden 
into a box of one or two rods square, will 
take the roots into his laboratory ; the 
vines and stalks and stems may go sprawl- 
ing about in the fields outside, ho will 
attend to the roots in his tub, gorge them 
with food that is good for them. The 
smaller his garden, the better he can feed 
it, and the larger the crop. As he nursed 
his Thanksgiving tu»-keys on bread and 
milk, so he will pamper his peaches and 
itrapes on the viands they like best. If 


459 

they have an appetite for potash or salt/ 
or iron, or ground bones, or even now and 
then for a dead hog, he will indulge them. 
They keep the secret well, and never tell 
on your table whence they drew their 
sunset complexions or their delicate 
flavours. 

See what the farmer accomplishes by a 
cartload of tiles ; he alters the climate by 
letting oflf water which kept the land cold 
through constant evaporation, and allows 
the warm rain to bring down into the 
roots the temperature of the air and of 
the surface-soil; and he deepens the soil, 
since the discharge of this standing water 
allows the roots of his plants to penetrate 
below the surface to the subsoil, and 
accelerates the ripening of the crop. The 
town of Concord is one of the oldest towns 
in this country, far on now in its third 
century. The select men have once in 
every five years perambulated the bound- 
aries, and yet, in this very year, a large 
quantity of land has been discovered and 
added to the town without a murmui of 
complaint from any quarter. By drainage 
we went down to a subsoil we did not 
know, and have found there is a Concord 
under old Concord, which we are now 
getting the best crops from ; a Middlesex 
under Middlesex; and, in fine, that Mas- 
sachusetts has a basement story more 
valuable, and that promises to pay a 
better rent, than all the superstructure. 
But these tiles have acquired by associa- 
tion a new interest. These tiles are 
political economists, confuters of Malthus 
and Ricardo ; they are so many Young 
Americans announcing a better era — more 
bread. They drain the land, make it 
sweet and friable ; have made English 
Chat Moss a garden, and will now do aa 
much for the Dismal Swamp. But beyond 
this benefit, they are the text of better 
opinions and better auguries for man- 
kind. 

There has been a nightmare bred in 
England of indigestion and spleen among 
landlords and loom-lords, namely, the 
dogma that men breed too fast for the 
powers of the soil ; that men multiply in a 
geometrical ratio, whilst corn only in an 
arithmetical ; and hence that, the more 
prosperous we are, the faster we approach 
these frightful limits ; nay, the plight of 
every new generation is worse than of the 
foregoing, because the first comers take 
up the best lands ; the next, the second 
best ; and each succeeding wave of popula- 
tion is driven to poorer, so that the land is 
ever yielding less returns to enlarging 
7 F 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


440 

hosts of eaters, Henry Carey, of Phila- 
delphia, replied : “ Not so, Mr. Malthus, 
but just the opposite of so is the fact.’* 

The first planter, the savage, without 
tools, looking chiefly to safety from his 
enemy — man or beast — takes poor land. 
The better lands are loaded with timber, 
which he cannot clear ; they need drain- 
age, which ha cannot attempt. He cannot 
plough, or fell trees, or drain the rich 
swamp. He is a poor creature;^ he 
scratches with a sharp stick, lives in a 
cave or a hutch, has no road but the trail 
of the moose or bear; he lives on their 
flesh when he can kill one, on roots and 
fruits when he cannot. He falls, and is 
lame ; he coughs, he has a stitch in his 
side, he has a fever and chills : when he is 
nungry, he cannot always kill and eat a 
bear— chances of war — sometimes the 
bear eats him. ’Tis long before he digs 
or plants at all, and then only a patch. 
Later he learns that his planting is better 
than hunting ; that the earth works faster 
for him than he can work for himself — 
works for him when he is asleep, when it 
rains, when heat overcomes him. The 
sunstroke which knocks him down brings 
his corn up. As his family thrive, and 
other planters come up around him, he 
begins to fell trees, and clear good land; 
and when, by and by, there is more skill, 
and tools and roads, the new generations 
are strong enough to open the lowlands, 
where the wash of mountains has accumu- 
lated the best soil, v/hich yield a hundred- 
fold the former crops. The last lands are 
the best lands. It needs science and 
great numbers to cultivate the best lands, 
and in the best manner. Thus true politi- 
cal economy is not mean, but liberal, and 
on the pattern of the sun and sky. Popu- 
lation increases in the ratio of morality ; 
credit exists in the ratio of morality. 

Meantime we cannot enumerate the in- 
cidents and agents of the farm without 
reverting to their influence on the farmer. 
Ho carries out this cumulative prepara- 


tion of means to their last effect. This 
crust of soil which ages have refined he 
refines again for the feeding of a civil and 
instructed people. The great elements 
with which he deals cannot leave him 
unaffected, or unconscious of his ministry ; 
but their influence somewhat resembles 
that which the same Nature has on the 
child — of subduing and silencing him. 
We see the farmer with pleasure and 
respect, when we think what powers and 
utilities are so meekly worn. He knows 
every secret of labour: he changes the 
face of the landscape. Put him on a new 
planet, and he would know where to 
begin ; yet there is no arrogance in his 
bearing, but a perfect gentleness. The 
farmer stands well on the world. Plain 
in manners as in dress, he would not 
shine in palaces ; he is absolutely unknown 
and inadmissible therein ; living or dying, 
he never shall be heard of in them ; yet 
the drawing-room heroes put down beside 
him would shrivel in his presence — ha 
solid and unexpressive, they expressed to 
gold-leaf. But he stands well on the 
world — as Adam did, as an Indian does, as 
Homer’s heroes, Agamemnon or Achilles, 
do. He is a person whom a poet of any 
clime — Milton, Firdusi, or Cervantes — 
would appreciate as being really a pieca 
of the old Nature, comparable to sun and 
moon, rainbow and flood ; because he is, 
as all natural persons are, representative 
of Nature as much as these. 

That uncorrupted behaviour which we 
admire in animals and in young children 
belongs to him, to the hunter, the sailor — 
the man who lives in the presence of 
Nature. Cities force growth, and make 
men talkative and entertaining, but they 
make them artificial. What possesses 
interest for us is the naturel of each, his 
constitutional excellence. This is forever 
a surprise, engaging and lovely ; we can- 
not be satiated with knowing it, and about 
it ; and it is this which the conversatio.a 
with Nature cherishes and guards. 


WORKS AND DAYS. 


Our nineteenth century is the age of 
tools. They grow out of our structure. 
“Man is the metre of all things,” said 
Aristotle; “the hand is the instrument 
of instruments, and the mind is the form 
of forms." The human body is the 
magazine of inventions, the patent-office, 
where are the models from which every 


hint was taken. All the tools and engines 
on earth are only extensions of its limbs 
and senses. One definition of man is 
“ an intelligence served by organs.’* 
Machines can only second, not supply, 
his unaided senses. The body is a metre. 
The eye appreciates finer differerces tluin 
art can expose. The apprentice clings to 



WORKS AND DAYS, 


his foot-rule, a practised mechanic will 
measure by his thumb and his arm with 
equal precision: and a good surveyor 
will pace sixteen rods more accurately 
than another man can measure them by 
tape. The sympathy of eye and hand by 
which an Indian or a practised slinger 
hits his mark with a stone, or a wood- 
chopper or a carpenter swings his axe to 
a hair line on his log, are examples ; and 
there is no sense or organ which is not 
capable of exquisite performance. 

Men love to wonder, and that is the 
seed of our science ; and such is the 
mechanical determination of our age, and 
so recent are our best contrivances, that 
use has not dulled our joy and pride in 
them ; and we pity our fathers for dying 
before steam and galvanism, sulphuric 
ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph 
and spectroscope arrived, as cheated out 
of half their human estate. These arts 
open great gates of a future, promising to 
make tJie world plastic and to lift human 
life out of its beggary to a godlike ease 
and power. 

Our century, to be sure, had inherited 
a tolerable apparatus. Wo had the com- 
/>ass, the printing-press, watches, the 
spiral spring, the barometer, the telescope. 
Yet so many inventions have been added, 
that life seems almost made over new ; 
and as Leibnitz said of Newton, “that if 
he reckoned all that had been done by 
mathematicians from the beginning of the 
world dov/n to Newton, and what had 
been done by him, his would be tlie better 
half,” so one might say that the inventions 
of tJiG last fifty years counterpoise those 
of tlio fifty centuries before Ikem. For 
the vast production and manifold applica- 
tion of iron is new ; and our common and 
iiidispensalfie utensils of house and farm 
are new ; the rewing machine, the power- 
loom, the McCormick reaper, the mowing- 
machines, gaslight, lucifer matches, and 
the immense productions of the laboratory, 
are new in this century, and one franc’s 
worth of coal does the work of a labourer 
for twenty days. 

Why need I speak of steam, the enemy 
of space and time, with its enormous 
strength and delicate applicability, which 
is made in hospitals to bring a bowl of 
gruel to a sick man’s bed, and can twist 
beams of iron like candy-braids, and vies 
with the forces which upheaved and 
doubled over the geologic strata ? Steam 
is an apt scholar and a strong-shouldered 
fellow, but it has not yet done all its 
wprk; It already walks about the fiold 


44 ^ 

like a man, and will do anything required 
of it. It irrigates crops, and drag# away 
a mountain. It must sew our shirts, it 
must drive our gigs; taught ty Mr, 
Babbage, it must calculate interest and 
logarithms. Lord Chancellor Thurlow 
thought it might be made to draw bills 
and answers in chancery. If that were 
i satire, it is yet coming to render many 
higher services of a mechanico-intellectual 
kind, and will leave the satire short of 
the fact. 

How excellent are the mechanical aids 
we have applied to the human body, as 
in dentistry, in vaccination, in the rhino- 
plastic treatment ; in the beautiful aid of 
ether, like a finer sleep ; and in the boldest 
promisor of all — the transfusion of the 
blood — which, in Paris, it ,was claimed, 
enables a man to change his blood as 
often as his linen I 

What of this dapper caoutchouc and 
gutta-percha, which make water-pipes 
and stomach-pumps, belting for mill- 
wheels, and diving bells, and rain-proof 
coats for all climates, which teach us to 
defy the wet, and put every man on a 
footing with the beaver and the crocodile ? 
What of the grand tools with which we 
engineer, like kobolds and enchanters — 
tunnelling Alps, canalling the American 
Isthmus, piercing the Arabian desert ? 
In Massachusetts, we fight the sea suc- 
cessfully with beach-grass and broom — 
and the blowing sand-barrens with pine 
plantations. The soil of Holland, once 
the most populous in Europe, is below 
the level of the sea. Egypt, where no 
rain fell for three thousand years, now, it 
is said, thanks Mehemet Ali’s irrigations 
and planted forests for late-returning 
showers. The old Hebrew Jdng said, 
“ He makes the wrath of man to praise 
him.” And there is no argument of 
theism better than the grandeur of ends 
brought about by paltry means. The 
chain of western railroads from Chicago 
to the Pacific has planted cities and civi- 
lization in less time than it costs to bring 
an orchard into bearing. 

What shall we say of the ocean tele- 
graph, that extension of the eye and ear, 
whose sudden performance astonished 
mankind as if the intellect were taking 
the brute earth itself into training, and 
shooting the first thrills of life and thought 
tlirough the unwilling brain ? 

There does not seem any limit to these 
new informations of the same Spirit that 
made the elements at first, and now, 
through maQt works them, Art and power 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


44a 

will go on as they have done— will make 
day out of night, time out of space, and 
Space out of time. 

Invention breeds invention. No sooner 
is the electric telegraph devised, than 
gutta-percha, the very material it requires, 
is found. The aeronaut is provided with 
gun-cotton, the very fuel he wants for his 
balloon. When commerce is vastly en- 
larged, California and Australia expose 
the gold it needs. When Europe is over 
populated, America and Australia crave 
to be peopled ; and so, throughout every 
chance is timed, as if Nature, who made 
the lock, knew where to find the key. 

Another result of our arts is the new 
intercourse which is surprising us with 
new solutions of the embarrassing politi- 
cal problems. The intercourse is not 
new, but the scale is new. Our selfishness 
would have held slaves, or would have 
excluded from a quarter of the planet all 
that are not born on the soil of that quar- 
ter. Our politics are disgusting; but 
what can they help or hinder when from 
time to time the primal instincts are im- 
pressed on masses of mankind, when the 
nations are in exodus and flux ? Nature 
loves to cross her stocks — and Gr-rman, I 
Chinese, Turk, Russ, and Kanaka Nvere ! 
putting out to sea, and intermarrying . ace 
with race ; and commerce took the hint, 

^ and ships w'ere built capacious enough to 
carry the people of a county. 

This thousand-handed art has intro- 
duced a new element into the state. The 
science of power is forced to remember 
the power of science. Civilization mounts 
and climbs. Malthus, when he stated 
that the mouths went on multiplying 
geometrically, and the food only arith- 
metically, forgot to say that the human 
mind was also a factor in political eco- 
nomy, and that the augmenting wants of 
society would be met by an augmenting 
power of invention. 

Yes, we have a pretty artillery of tools 
now in our social arrangements : we ride 
four times as fast as our fathers did ; 
travel, grind, v/eave, forge, plant, till, and 
excavate better. We have new shoes, 
gloves, glasses, and gimlets ; w’e have the 
calculus ; we have the newspaper, which 
does its best to make every square acre 
of land and sea give an account of itself 
at your breakfast-table ; we have money, 
and paper money ; we have language — the 
finest tool of all, and nearest to the mind. 
Much will have more. Man flatters him- 
self that his command over nature must 
increase* Things begin to obey him, We 


are to have the balloon yet and the next 
war will be fought in the air. We may 
yet find a rose-water that will wash the 
negro white. He sees the skull of the 
English race changing from its Saxon 
type under the exigencies of American 
life. 

Tantalus, wno in old times was seen 
vainly trying to quench his thirst with a 
flowing stream, which ebbed whenever he 
approached it, has been seen again lately, 
He is in Paris, in New York, in Boston, 
He is now in great spirits ; thinks he shall 
reach it yet ; thinks he shall bottle the 
wave. It is, however, getting a little 
doubtful. Things have an ugly look still. 
No matter how many centuries of culture 
have preceded, the new man always finds 
himself standing on the brink of cliaos, 
always in a crisis. Can anybc:ly remem- 
ber when the times were not iiard, and 
money not scarce ? Can anyoody remem- 
ber when sensible men, and the right sort 
of men, and the right sort of women, were 
plentiful ? Tantalus begins to think steam 
a delusion, and galvanism no better than 
it should be. 

Many facts concur to show that wo 
must look deeper for our salvation than 
to steam, photographs, balloons, or astro- 
nomy. These tools have some question- 
able properties. They are reagents. 
MacliiiK.ry is aggressive. The weaver 
becomes a web, the machinist a machine. 
If you do not use the tools, they use you. 
All tools are in one sense edge-tools, and 
i dangerous. A man builds a fine house ; 
and now he has a master and a task for 
life; lie is to furnish, watch, sliow it, and 
keep it in repair, the rest of his days. A 
man has a reputation, and is no longer 
free, but must respect that. A man makes 
a picture or a book, and, if it succeeds, it 
is often the worse for him. I saw a bravo 
man the other day, hitherto as free as the 
hav/k or the fox of the wilderness, con- 
slrucling his cabinet of drawers for shells, 
eggs, minerals, and mounted birds. It 
was easy to see that he was amusing him- 
self with making pretty links for his own 
limbs. 

Then the political economist thinks " it 
is douhjtful if all the mechanical inventions 
that ever existed have lightened the day’s 
toil of one human being.” The machine 
unmakes the man. Now that the machine 
is so perfect, the engineer is nobody. 
Every new step in improving the engine 
restricts one more act of the engineer— 
unteaches him. Once it took Archimedes ; 
now it only needs a fireman, and a boy to 



WORKS AND DAYS. 


know the coppers, to pull up the handles 
or mind the water-tank. But when the 
engine breaks, they can do nothing. 

What sickening details in the daily jour- 
nals. I believe they have ceased to publish 
the “Newgate Calendar’* and the “ Pirate’s 
Own Book’’ I since the family news- 
papers, namely, the New York Tribune 
and the London Times, have quite super- 
seded them in the freshness, as well as the 
horror, of their records of crime. Politics 
were never more corrupt and brutal ; and 
Trade, that pride and darling of our 
ocean, that educator of nations, that bene- 
factor in spite of itself, ends in shameful 
defaulting, bubble, and bankruptcy all 
over the world. Of course, we resort to 
the enumeration of his arts and inventions 
as a measure of the worth of man. But 
if, with all his arts, he is a felon, we can- 
not assume the mechanical skill or chemi- 
cal resources as the measure of worth. 
Let us try another gauge. 

What have these arts done for the 
character, for the worth of mankind ? Are 
men better ? ’Tis sometimes questioned 
whether morals have not declined as the 
arts have ascended. Here are great arts 
and little men. Here is greatness begot- 
ten of paltriness. We cannot trace the 
triumphs of civilization to such benefac- 
tors as we wish. The greatest meliorator 
of the world is selfish, huxtering Trade. 
Every victory over matter ought to recom- 
mend to man the worth of his nature. 
But now one wonders who did all this 
good. Look up the inventors. Each has 
his own knack ; his genius is in veins and 
spots. But the great, equal, symmetrical 
brain, fed from a great heart, you shall 
not find. Every one has more to hide 
than he has to show, or is lamed by his 
excellence. ’T is too plain that with the 
material power the moral progress has 
not kept pace. It appears tliat w'e have 
not made a judicious investment. Works 
and days were offered us, and v/e took 
works, 

The new study of the Sanskrit has 
shown us the origin of the old names of 
God— Dyaus, Deus, Zeus, Zeu pater, 
Jupiter — names of the sun, still recogniz- 
able through the modifications of our 
vernacular words, importing that the Day 
is the Divine Power and Manifestation, 
and indicating that those ancient men, in 
their attempts to express the Supremo 
Power of the universe, call him the Day, 
and that this name was accepted by all the 
tribes. 

Hesiod wrote a poem which he called 


443 

“ Works and Days,’’ in which he marked 
the changes of the Greek year, instruct- 
ing the husbandman at the rising of what 
constellation he might safely sow, when 
to reap, when to gather wood, when the 
sailor might launch his boat in security 
from storms, and what admonitions of 
the planets he must heed. It is full of 
economies for Grecian life, noting he 
proper age for marriage, the rules of 
household thrift, and of liospitality. The 
poem is full of piety as well as prudence, 
and is adapted to all meridians, by adding 
the ethics of works and of days. But ho 
has not pushed his study of days into 
such inquiry and analysis as they invite. 

A farmer said “ he should like to havo 
all the land that joined his own.’’ Bona- 
parte, who had the same appetite, en- 
deavoured to make the Mediterranean a 
French lake. Czar Alexander was more 
expansive, and wished to call the Pacific 
vty ocean ; and the Americans were obliged 
to resist his attempts to make it a close 
sea. But if he had the earth for his pas- 
ture, and the sea for his pond, he would 
be a pauper still. He only is rich who 
owns the day. There is no king, rich 
man, fairy, or demon who possesses such 
power as that. The days are ever divine 
as to the first Aryans. They are of the 
least pretension, and of the greatest 
capacity, of anything that exists. They 
come and go like muffled and veiled 
figures, sent from a distant friendly 
party ; but they say nothing ; and if we 
do not use the gifts they bring, they carry 
them as silently away. 

How the day fits itself to the mind, 
winds itself round it like a fine drapery, 
clothing all its fancies ! Any holiday 
communicates to us its colour. We wear 
its cockade and favours in our humour. Ke- 
member what boys think in the morning 
of “ Election day,’’ of the Fourth of July, 
of Thanksgiving, of Christmas. The very 
stars in their courses wink to them of 
nuts and cakes, bonbons, presents, and 
fireworks. Cannot memory still descry 
the old school-house and its porch, some- 
what hacked by jack-knives, where you 
spun tops and snapped marbles ; and do 
you not recall that life was then calen- 
dared by moments, threw itself into ner- 
vous knots or glittering hours, even as 
now, and not spread itself abroad aa 
equable felicity ? In college terms, and 
in years that followed, the young graduate, 
when the Commencement anniversary 
returned, though he were in a swamp, 
would see a festive light, and find the olf 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


444 

faintly echoing with plausive academic 
thunders. In solitude and in the country, 
what dignity distinguishes the holy time ! 
The old Sabbath, or Seventh Day, white 
with the religions of unknown thousands 
of years, when this hallowed hour dawns 
out of the deep— a clean page which the 
wise may inscribe with truth, whilst the 
savage scrawls it with fetishes — the cathe- 
dral music of history breathes through it 
a psalm to our solitude. 

So, in the common experience of the 
scholar, the weathers fit his moods. A 
thousand tunes th-e variable wind plays, a 
thousand spectacles it brings, and each is 
the frame or dwelling of a new spirit. I 
used formerly to choose my time with 
some nicety for each favourite book. One 
author is good for winter, and one for the 
dog-days. The scholar must look long 
for the right hour for Plato’s Timsens. 
At last the elect morning arrives, the 
early dawn — a few lights conspicuous in 
the heaven, as of a world just created 
and still becoming — and in its wide leisures 
we dare open that book. 

There are days when the great are near 
us, when there is no frown on their brow, 
no condescension even ; when they take 
us by the hand, and we share their thought, j 
There are days which are the carnival of 
the year. The angels assume flesh, and 
repeatedly become visible. The imagina- 
tion of the gods is excited, and rushes on 
every side into forms. Yesterday not a 
bird peeped ; the world was barren, peaked, 
and pining ; to-day 'tis inconceivably popu- 
lous ; creation swarms and meliorates. 

The days are made on a loom whereof 
the warp and woof aro past and future 
time. They are majestically dressed, as 
if every god brought a thread to the skyey 
web. ’Tis pitiful tlie things by which we 
are rich or poor — a matter of coins, coats, 
and carpets, a little more or less stone, 
or wood, or paint, the fashion of a cloak 
or hat ; like the luck of naked Indians, of 
whom one is proud in the possession of a 
glass bead or a red feather, and the rest 
miserable in the want of it. But the 
treasures which Nature spent itself to 
amass — the secular, refined, composite 
anatomy of man — which all strata go to 
form, which the prior races, from infusory 
and saurian, existed to ripen ; the sur- 
rounding plastic natures ; the earth with 
its foods ; the intellectual, temperamenting 
air; the sea with its invitations; the 
heaven deep with worlds ; and the answer- 
ing brain and nervous structure replying 
to these; the eye that looketh into the 


deeps, which again look back to the eye 
— abyss to abyss ; — these, not like a glass 
bead, or the coins or carpets, are given 
immeasurably to all. 

This miracle is hurled into every 
beggar’s hands. The blue sky is a cover- 
ing for a market, and for the cherubim 
and seraphim. The sky is the varnish or 
glory with which the Artist has washed 
the whole work — the verge or confines of 
matter and spirit. Nature could no farther 
go. Could our happiest dream come to 
pass in solid fact— could a power open 
our eyes to behold “ millions of spiritual 
creatures walk the earth ” — I believe I 
should find that mid-plain on which they 
moved floored beneath and arched above 
with the same web of blue depth which 
weaves itself over me now, as I trudge the 
streets on my affairs. 

’Tis singular that our rich English 
language should have no word to denote 
the face of the world. Kinde was the old 
English term, which, however, filled only 
half the range of our fine Latin word, 
with its delicate future tense — naUiYa^ 
about to be born^ or what German philo- 
sophy denotes as a becoming. But nothing 
expresses that power which seems to work 
for beauty alone. The Greek Kosmo9~ 
did ; and therefore, with great propriety 
Humboldt entitles his book, which re- 
counts the last results of science, Cosmos, 

Such arc the days — the earth is the cup, 
the sky is the cover, of the immense 
bounty of nature which is offered us for 
our daily aliment ; but what a force of 
illusion begins life with us, and attends 
us to the end ! We are coaxed, flattered, 
and duped, from morn to eve, from birth 
to death ; and where is the old eye that 
ever saw through the deception ? The 
Hindoos represent Maia, the illusory 
energy of Vishnu, as one of his principal 
attributes. As if, in this gale of warring 
elements, which life is, it was necessary 
to bind souls to human life as mariners 
in a tempest lash themselves to the mast 
and bulwarks of a ship, and Nature 
employed certain illusions as her ties and 
straps — a rattle, a doll, an apple, for a 
child ; skates, a river, a boat, a horse, a 
gun, for the growing boy — and I will not 
begin to name those of the youth and 
adult, for they are numberless. Seldom 
and slowly the mask falls, and the pupil 
is permitted to see that all is one stuff, 
cooked and painted under many counter- 
feit appearances. Hume’s doctrine was 
that the circumstances vary, the amount 
of happiness does not ; that the beggar 



WORKS AND DAYS. 


cracking fleas in the sunshine under a 
hedge, and the duke rolling by in his 
chariot, the girl equipped for her first 
ball, and the orator returning triumphant 
from the debate, had different means, but 
the same quantity of pleasant excitement. 

This element of illusion lends all its 
force to hide the values of present time. 
Who is he that does not always find him- 
self doing something less than his best 
task? “What are you doing?” “Oh, 
nothing; I have been doing thus, or I 

shall do so or so, but now I am only ” 

Ah ; poor dupe, will you never slip out of 
the web of the master juggler— never learn 
that, as -soon as the irrecoverable years 
have woven their blue glory between to- 
day and us, these passing hours shall 
glitter and draw us, as the wildest romance 
and the homes of beauty and poetry? 
How difficult to deal erect with them ! 
The events they bring, their trade, enter- 
tainments, and gossip, their urgent work, 
all throw dust in the eyes and distract 
attention. He is a strong man who can 
look them in the eye, see through this 
juggle, feel their identity, and keep his 
own ; who can know surely that one will 
be like another to the end of the world, 
nor permit love, or death, or politics, or 
money, war, or pleasure, to draw him 
from his task, 

The world is always equal to itself, and 
every man in moments of deeper thought 
is apprised that he is repeating the ex- 
periences of the people in the streets of 
Thebes or Byzantium. An everlasting 
Now reigns in nature, which hangs the 
same roses on our bushes which charmed 
the Roman and the Chaldaean in their 
hanging gardens. “ To what end, then,” 
he asks, “ should I study languages, and 
traverse countries, to learn so simple 
truths ? ” 

History of ancient art, excavated cities, 
recovery of books and inscriptions — yes, 
the works were beautiful, and the history 
worth knowing; and academies convene 
to settle the claims of the old schools. 
What journeys and measurements — Nie- 
buhr and Miiller and Layard— to identify 
the plain of Troy and Nimroud town ? 
And your homage to Dante costs you so 
much sailing ; and to ascertain the dis- 
coverers of America needs as much voyag- 
ing as the discovery cost. Poor child! 
that flexile clay of which these old brothers 
moulded their admirable symbols was not 
Persian, nor Memphian, nor Teutonic, 
nor local at all, but was common lime and 
•ilex and water, and sunlight, the heat of 


M5 

the blood, and the hearing of the lungs; 
it was that clay which thou heldest but 
now in thy foolish hands, and threwest 
away to go and seek in vain in sepulchres, 
mummy-pits, and old book-shops of Asia 
Minor, Egypt, and England. It was the 
deep to-day which all men scorn ; the 
rich poverty, which men hate ; the popu- 
lous, all-loving solitude, which men quit 
for the tattle of towns. He lurks, he 
hides — he who is success, reality, joy, and 
power. One of the illusions is that the 
present hour is not the critical, decisive 
hour. Write it on your heart that every 
day is the best day in the year. No man 
has learned anything rightly, until he 
knows that every day is Doomsday. *Tis 
the old secret of the gods that they come 
in low disguises. ’Tis the vulgar great 
who come dizened with gold and jewels. 
Real kings hide away their crowns in their 
wardrobes, and affect a plain and poor 
exterior. In the Norse legend of our 
ancestors, Odin dwells in a fisher’s hut, 
and patches a boat. In the Hindoo legends, 
Hari dwells a peasant among peasants. 
In the Greek legend, Apollo lodges with 
the shepherds of Admetus ; and Jove liked 
to rusticate tamong the poor Ethiopians, 
So, in our history, Jesus is born in a barn, 
and his twelve peers are fishermen. ’Tis 
the very principle of science that Nature 
shows herself best in leasts ; ’twas the 
maxim of Aristotle and Lucretius; and, 
in modern times, of Swedenborg and of 
Hahnemann. The order of changes in 
the egg determines the age of fossil strata. 
So it was the rule of our poets, in the 
legends of fairy lore, that the fairies 
largest in power were the least in size. 
In the Christian graces, humility stands 
highest of all, in the form of the Madonna ; 
and in life, this is the secret of the wise. 
We owe to genius always the same debt, 
of lifting the curtain from the common, 
and showing us that divinities are sitting 
disguised in the seeming gang of gipsies 
and pedlars. In daily life, what dis- 
tinguishes the master is the using those 
materials he has, instead of looking about 
for what are more renowned, or what 
others have used well. ” A general,” said 
Bonaparte, “ always has troops enough, 
if he only knows how to employ those he 
has, and bivouacs with them.” Do not 
refuse the employment which the hour 
brings you, for one more ambitious. The 
highest heaven of wisdom is alike near 
from every point, and thou must find 
it. if at all, by methods native to thyself 
alone, 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


446 

That work is ever the more pleasant to 
the imagination which is not now required. 
How wistfully, when we have promised to 
attend the working committee, we look at 
the distant hills and their seductions I 

The use of history is to give value to 
the present hour and its duty. That is 
good which commends to me my country, 
my climate, my means and materials, my 
associates. I knew a man in a certain 
religious exaltation, who “thought it an | 
honour to wash his own face. ’ ' He seemed , 
to me more sane than those who hold | 
themselves cheap. 

Zoologists may deny that horse-hairs in 
the water change to worms ; but I find 
that whatever is old corrupts, and the past 
turns to snakes. The reverence for the 
deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous 
sentiment. Their merit was not to reve- 
rence the old, but to honour the present 
moment ; and we falsely make them ex- 
cuses of the very habit which they hated 
and defied. 

Another illusion is, that there is not 
time enough for our work. Yet we might 
reflect that though many creatures eat 
from one dish, each, according to its con- 
stitution, assimilates from the elements 
what belongs to it, whether time, or space, 
or light, or water, or food. A snake con- 
verts whatever prey the meadow yields 
him into snake ; a fox into fox ; and Peter 
and John are working up all existence 
into Peter and John. A poor Indian chief 
of the Six Nations of New York made a 
wiser reply than any philosopher, to some 
one complaining that he had not enough 
time. “ Well,” said Red Jacket, “ I sup- 
pose you have all there is,” 

A third illusion haunts us, that a long 
duration, as a year, a decade, a century, 
is valuable. But an old French sentence 
says, “ God works in moments ” — ‘ Enpeu 
d'henre Dieu labeurt'' We ask for long 
life, but 'tis deep life, or grand moments, 
that signify. Let the measure of time be 
spiritual, not mechanical. Life is un- 
necessarily long. Moments of insight, of 
fin? nersonal relation, a smile, a glance — 
whai ample borrowers of eternity they are I 
Life culminates and concentrates; and 
Homer said, “The gods ever give to 
mortals their apportioned share of reason 
only on one day.” 

I am of the opinion of the poet Words- 
worth, ” that there is no real happiness in 
this life, but in intellect and virtue.” I am 
of the opinion of Pliny, “ that, whilst we 
are musing on these things, we are adding 
to the length of our lives.” I am of the 


opinion of Glauco, who Said^ ‘ The mea- 
sure of life, O Socrates, is, with the wise, 
the speaking and hearing such discourses 
as yours.” 

He only can enrich me who can recom- 
mend to me the space between sun and 
sun. ’Tis the measure of a man — his 
apprehension of a day. For w’e do not 
listen with the best regard to the verses of 
a man who is only a poet, nor to his 
problems, if he is only an algebraist ; but 
if a man is at once acquainted with the 
geometric foundations of things and with 
their festal splendour, his poetry is exact 
and his arithmetic musical. And him I 
reckon the most learned scholar, not who 
can unearth for me the buried dynasties 
of Sesostris and Ptolemy, the Sothiac era, 
the Olympiads and consulships, but who 
I can unfold the theory of this particular 
Wednesday. Can he uncover the liga- 
ments concealed from all but piety, which 
attach the dull men and things we know 
to the First Cause ? These passing fifteen 
minutes, men think, are time, not eter- 
nity; are low and subaltern, are but hope 
or memory, that is, the way to or the way 
\ from welfare, but not welfare. Can he 
show their tie ? That interpreter shall 
guide us from a menial and eleemosynary 
existence into riches and stability. lie 
dignifies the place where he is. This 
mendicant America, this curious, peering, 
itinerant, imitative America, studious of 
Greece and Rome, of England and Ger- 
many, will take off its dusty shoes, will 
take off its glazed traveller’s cap, and sit 
at home with repose and deep joy on its 
face. The world has no such landscape, 
the aeons of history no such hour, the 
future no equal second opportunity. Now 
let poets sing ! now let arts unfold ! 

One more view remains. But life is 
good only when it is magical and musical, 
a perfect timing and consent, and when 
we do not anatomize it. You must treat 
the days respectfully, you must be a day 
yourself, and not interrogate it like a 
college professor. The world is enig- 
matical — everything said, and everything 
known or done — and must not be taken 
literally, but genially. We must bo at 
the top of our condition to understand 
anything rightly. You must hear the bird’s 
song without attempting to render it into 
nouns and verbs. Cannot we be a little 
abstemious and obedient ? Cannot we let 
the morning be ? 

Everything in the universe goes by in- 
direction. There are no straight lines, K 
i remember well the foreign scholar wha 



nrORKS AND DA F5. 


made a week of my youth happy by his 
visit. " The savages in the islands,” he 
said, ” delight to play with the surf, coming 
in on the top of the rollers, then swimming 
out again, and repeat the delicious ma- 
noeuvre for hours. Well, human life is 
made up of such transits. There can be 
no greatness without abandonment. But 
here your very astronomy is an espionage. 
I dare not go out of doors and see the 
moon and stars, but they seem to measure 
my tasks, to ask how many lines or pages 
are finished since I saw them last. No so, 
as I told you, was it in Belleisle. The 
days at Belleisle were all different, and 
only joined by a perfect love of the same 
object. Just to fill the hour — that is hap- 
piness. Fill my hour, ye gods, so that I 
shall not say, whilst I have done this, 
* Behold, also, an hour of my life is gone * 
— but rather, ‘ I have lived an hour.’ ” 

We do not want factitious men, who 
can do any literary or professional feat, 
as, to write poems, or advocate a cause, 
or carry a measure for money ; or turn 
their ability indifferently in any particular 
direction by the strong effort of will. No, 
what has been best done in the world— 
the works of genius— cost nothing, There 
is no painful effort, but it is the spon- 
taneous flowing of the thought. Shakes- 
peare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves 
Its nest. Poems have been written 
between sleeping and waking, irrespon- 
sibly. Fancy defines herself : — 

“ Forms that men spy 
With the half-shut eye 
In the beams of the setting sun, am I/' 

The masters painted for joy, and knew 
not that virtue had gone out of them. 
They could not paint the like in cold 
blood. The masters of English lyric 
wrote their songs so. It was a fine 
efflorescence of fine powers ; as was said 
of the letters of the Frenchwomen — ” the 
iharming accident of their more charming 
existence.” Then the poet is never the 
poorer for his song. A song is no song 
unless the circumstance is free and fine. 
If the singer sing from a sense of duty or 
from seeing no way of escape, I had 
rather have none. Those only can sleep 
who do not care to sleep ; and those only 
write or speak best who do not too much 
respect the writing or the speaking. 

The same rule holds in science. The 
savant is often an amateur. His per- 
formance is a memoir to the Academy on 
fish-worms, tadpoles, or spiders’ legs; he 
observes as other academicians observe : 


44f 

he is on stilts at a microscope, and— his 
memoir finished and read and printed— 
he retreats into his routinary existence, 
which is quite separate from his scien- 
tific. But in Newton, science wat as 
easy as breathing ; he used the same wit 
to weigh the moon that he used to buckle 
his shoes ; and all his life was simple, 
wise, and majestic. So was it in Archi- 
medes— always self-same, like the sky. 
In Linnaeus, in Franklin, the like sweet- 
ness and equality — no stilts, no tiptoe ; 
and their results are wholesome and 
memorable to all men. 

In stripping time of its illusions, in 
seeking to find what is the heart of the 
day, we come to the quality of the 
moment, and drop the duration alto- 
gether. It is the depth at which we live, 
and not at all the surface extension, that 
imports. We pierce to the eternity, of 
which time is the flitting surface; and, 
really, the least acceleration of thought, 
and the least increase of power of thought, 
make life to seem and to be of vast dura- 
tion. We call it time ; but when that ac- 
celeration and that deepening take effect, 
it acquires another and a higher name. 

There are people who do not need 
much experimenting ; who, after years of 
activity, say, we knew all this before ; 
who love at first sight and hate at first 
sight ; discern the affinities and repul- 
sions ; who do not care so much for con- 
ditions as others, for they are always in 
one condition, and enjoy themselves; who 
dictate to others, and are not dictated to ; 
who in tlieir consciousness of deserving 
success constantly slight the ordinary 
means of attaining it ; who have self- 
existence and self-help ; who are suffered 
to be themselves in society ; who are 
great in the present ; who have no talents, 
or care not to have them — being that 
which was before talent, and shall be 
after it, and of which talent seems only a 
tool — this is character, the highest name 
at which philosophy has arrived. 

’Tis not important how the hero does 
this or this, but what he is. What he ia 
will appear in every gesture and syllable. 
In this way the moment and the character 
are one. 

’Tis a fine fable for the advantage of 
character over talent, the Greek legend of 
the strife of Jove and Phoebus. Phoebus 
challenged the gods, and said, “Who 
will outshoot the far-darting Apollo ? 
Zeus said ” I will.” Mars shook the lota 
in his helmet, and that of Apollo leaped 
out first, Apollo stretched his bow aod 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


448 

Bhot his Brrow into the extreme west. 
Then Zeus arose, and with one stride 
cleared the whole distance, and said, 

Where shall I shoot ? there is no space 
left.” So the bowman’s prize was ad- 
judged to him who drew no bow. 

And this is the progress of every earnest 
mind ; from the works of man and the 
activity of the hands to a delight in the 
faculties which rule them ; from a respect 
to the works to a wise wonder at this 
mystic element of time in which he is 
conditioned ; from local skills and the 


economy which reckons the amount of 
production per hour to the finer econorjy 
which respects the quality of what is 
done, and the right we have to the work, 
or the fidelity with which it flows from 
ourselves ; then to the depth of thought it 
betrays, looking to its universality, or, 
that its roots are in eternity, not in time. 
Then it flows from character, that fcublime 
health which values one moment as 
another, and makes us great in all con- 
ditions, and is the only definition we have 
of freedom and power, 


BOOKS. 


It is easy to accuse books, and bad 
ones are easily found ; and the best are 
but records, and not the things recorded ; 
and certainly there is dilettanteism 
enough, and books that are merely neutral 
and do nothing for us. In Plato’s ” Gor- 
gias,” Socrates says : ” The shipmaster 
walks in a modest garb near the sea, after 
bringing his passengers from Angina or 
from Pontus, not thinking he has done 
anything extraordinary, and certainly 
knowing that his passengers are the same, 
and in no respect better than when he 
took them on board.” So is it with books, 
for the most part ; they work no redemp- 
tion in us. The bookseller might certainly 
know that his customers are in no respect 
better for the purchase and consumption 
of his wares. The volume is dear at a 
dollar, and, after reading to weariness the 
lettered backs, we leave the shop with a 
sigh, and learn, as I did, without surprise, 
of a surly bank director, that in bank 
parlours they estimate all stocks of this 
kind as rubbish. 

But it is not less true that there are 
books which are of that importance in a 
man’s private experience, as to verify for 
him the fables of Cornelius Agrippa, of 
Michael Scott, or of the old Orpheus of 
Thrace — books which take rank in our 
life with parents and lovers and passionate 
experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, 
so revolutionary, so authoritative— books 
which are the work and the proof of 
faculties so comprehensive, so nearly 
equal to the world which they paint, that, 
though one shuts them with meaner ones, 
he feels his exclusion from them to accuse 
his way of living. 

Consider what you have In the smallest 
chosen library. A company of the wisest 
and wittiest men that could be picked out ! 


of all civil countries, in a thousand years, 
have set in best order the results of their 
learning and wisdom. The men them- 
selves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, 
impatient of interruption, fenced by eti- 
quette; but the thought which they did 
not uncover to their bosom friend is here 
written out in transparent words to us, 
the strangers of anotlier age. 

We owe to books those general benefits 
which come from high intellectual action- 
Thus, I think, we often owe to them the 
perception of immortality. They impart 
sympathetic activity to the moral power. 
Go with mean people, and you think life 
is mean. Then read Plutarch, and the 
world is a proud place, peopled with men 
of positive quality, with heroes and demi- 
gods standing around us, who will not let 
us sleep. Then they address the imagina- 
tion : only poetry inspires poetry. They 
become the organic culture of the time. 
College education is the reading of certain 
books which the common sense of all 
scholars agrees will represent the science 
already accumulated. If you know that 
— for instance in geometry, if you have 
read Euclid and Laplace — your opinion 
has some value ; if you do not know these, 
you are not entitled to give any opinion 
on the subject. Whenever any sceptic or 
bigot claims to be heard on the questions 
of intellect and morals, we ask if he is 
familiar with the books of Plato, where all 
his pert objections have once for all been 
disposed of. If not, he has no right to 
our time. Let him go and find himself 
answered there. 

Meantime the colleges, whilst they pro- 
vide us with libraries, furnish no professor 
of books ; and, 1 think, no chair is so 
much wanted. In a library wo are sur- 
rounded by many hundreds of dear friends. 



BOOKS. 




but they are imprisoned by an enchanter 
in these paper and leathern boxes; and 
though they know us, and have been wait- 
ing two, ten, or twenty centuries for us — 
some of them — and are eager to give us a 
sign, and unbosom themselves, it is the 
law of their limbo that they must not 
speak until spoken to; and as the en- 
chanter has dressed them, like battalions 
of infantry, in coat and jacket of one cut, 
by the thousand and ten thousand, your 
chance of hitting on the right one is to 
be computed by the arithmetical rule of 
Permutation and Combination — not a 
choice out of three caskets, but out of 
half a million caskets all alike. But it 
happens in our experience, that in this 
lottery there are at least fifty or a hundred 
blanks to a prize. It seems, then, as 
if some charitable soul, after losing a 
great deal of time among the false books, 
and alighting upon a few true ones which 
made him happy and wise, w'ould do a 
right act in .naming those which have 
been bridges or ships to carry him safely 
over dark morasses and barren oceans, 
into the heart of sacred cities, into palaces 
and temples. This would best be done 
by these great masters of books who from 
time to time appear — the Fabricii, the 
Seldcns, Magliabecchis, Scaligers, Miran- 
dolas, Bayles, Johnsons, whose eyes sweep 
the whole horizon of learning. Hut pri- 
vate readers, reading purely for love of 
the book, would serve us by leaving 
each the shortest note of what he found. 

There are books ; and it is practicable 
to read them, because they are so few. We 
look over with a sigh the monumental 
libraries of Paris, of the Vatican, and the 
British Museum. In 1S58, the number of 
printed books in the Imperial Library at 
Paris was estimated at eight hundred 
thousand volumes ; with an annual in- 
crease of twelve thousand volumes ; so 
that the number of printed books extant 
to-day may easily exceed a million. It 
is easy to count the number of pages 
which a diligent man can read in a day, 
and the number of years which human 
life in favourable circumstances allows to 
reading; and to demonstrate, that, though 
he should read from dawn till dark, for 
sixty years, he must die in the first 
alcoves. But nothing can be more decep- 
tive than this arithmetic, where none but 
a natural method is really pertinent, I 
visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, 
and I can seldom go there without renew- 
ing the conviction that the best of it all is 
already within the four walls of my study 


449 

at home. The Inspection of the catalogue 
brings me continually back tc the few 
standard writers who are on everyprivato 
shelf ; and to these it can afford only the 
most slight and casual additions. The 
crowds and centuries of books are only 
commentary and elucidation, echoes and 
weakeners of these few great voices of 
Time. 

The best rule of reading will be a 
method from nature, and not a mechanical 
one of hours and pages. It holds each 
student to a , pursuit of his native aim, 
instead of a desultory miscellany. Let 
him read what is proper to him, and not 
waste his memory on a crowd of medio- 
crities. As v/hole nations have derived 
their culture from a single book — as the 
Bible has been the literature as well as 
the religion of large portions of Europe — 
as Hafiz was the eminent genius of the 
Persians, Confucius of the Chinese, Cer- 
vantes of the .Spaniards ; so, perhaps, the 
human mind would bo a gainer, if all the 
secondary v/riters were lost — say, in 
England, all but Shakspeare, Milton, and 
Bacon — through the profounder study so 
drawn to those wonderful minds. With 
this pilot of his own genius, let the 
student read one, or let him read many, 
he will read advantageously. Dr. John- 
son said : “ Whilst you stand deliberating 
which book your son shall read first, 
another boy has read both : read anything 
five hours a day, and you will soon be 
learned.” 

Nature is much our friend in this mat- 
ter. Nature is always clarifying her water 
and her wine. No filtration can be so 
perfect. She docs the same thing by 
books as by her gases and plants. Theta 
is always a selection in writers, and then 
a selection from the selection. In the 
first place, all books that get fairly into 
the vital air of the world were written by 
the successful class, by the affirming and 
advancing class, who utter what tens of 
thousands feel though they cannot say. 
There has already been a scrutiny and 
choice from many hundreds of young 
pens, before the pamphlet or political 
chapter which you read in a fugitive jour- 
nal comes to your eye. All these are 
young adventurers, who produce their 
performance to the wise ear of Time, who 
sits and weighs, and, ten years hence, 
out of a million of pages reprints one. 
Again it is judged, it is winnowed by all 
the winds of opinion, and what terrific 
selection has not passed on it before it 
can be reprinted after twenty years — and 



SOCIETY AND SOLITVDB. 


45 « 

reprinted after a century I — it is as if Minos 
and Rh ad am an til us had indorsed the 
writing. ’Tis therefore an economy of time 
to read old and famed books. Nothing 
can be preserved which is not good ; 
and I know beforehand that Pindar, Mar- 
tial, Terence, Galen, Kepler, Galileo, 
Bacon, Erasmus, More, will be superior 
to the average intellect. In contempo- 
raries, it is not so easy to distinguish be- 
twixt notoriety and fame. 

Be sure, then, to read no mean books. 
Shun the spawn of the press on the gossip 
of the hour. Do not read what you shall 
learn, without asking, in the street and I 
the train. Dr. Johnson said, " he always 
went into stately shops ; ” and good 
travellers stop at the best hotels ; for, 
though they cost more, they do not cost 
much more, and there is the good com- 
pany and the best information. In like 
manner, the scholar knows that the famed 
books contain, first and last, the best 
thoughts and facts. Now and then, by 
rarest luck, in some foolish Grub Street 
is the gem we want. But in the best 
circles is the best information. If you 
should transfer the amount of your read- 
ing day by day from the newspaper to 

the standard authors But who dare 

speak of such a thing ? 

The three practical rules, then, which I 
have to offer are : — i. Never read any 
book that is not a year old. 2. Never 
read any but famed books. 3. Never read 
any but what you like ; or, in Shakspeare’s 
phrase : — 

“ No profit goes where is no pleasure ta’en : 

In brief, sir, study what you most affect.” 

Montaigne says, “ Books are a languid 
pleasure ” ; but I find certain books vital 
and spermatic, not leaving the reader 
what he was ; he shuts the book a richer 
man. I would never willingly read any 
others than such. And I will venture, at 
the risk of inditing a list of old primers 
and grammars, to count the few books 
which a superficial reader must thankfully 
use. 

Of the old Greek books, I think there 
are five which we cannot spare : — i. 
Homer, who in spite of Pope and all the 
learned uproar of centuries, has really 
the true fire, and is good for simple minds, 
is the true and adequate germ of Greece, 
and occupies that place as history, which 
nothing can supply. It holds through all 
literature that our best history is still 
poetry. It is so in Hebrew, in Sanskrit, 
and m Greek. English history is best 


known through Shakspeare; how mucb 
through Merlin, Robin Hood and the 
Scottish ballads !— the German, through 
the Nibelungenlied— the Spanish, through 
the Cid. Of Homer, George Chapman’s 
is the heroic translation, though the most 
literal prose version is the best of all. 
2. Herodotus, whose history contains in- 
estimable anecdotes, which brought it 
with the learned into a sort of disesteem ; 
but in these days, when it is found that 
what is most memorable of history is a 
few anecdotes, and that we need not be 
alarmed though we should find itr\ot dull, 
it is regaining credit. 3. Aeschylus, the 
grandest of the three tragedians, who has 
given us under a thin veil the first plan- 
tation of Europe. The “Prometheus” 
is a poem of the like dignity and scope as 
the Book of Job, or the Norse Edda. 
4. Of Plato I hesitate to speak, lest there 
should be no end. You find in him that 
which you have already found in Homer, 
now ripened to thought — the poet con- 
verted to a philosopher, with loftier 
strains of musical wisdom than Homer 
reached ; as if Homer were the youth, 
and Plato the finished man ; yet with no 
less security of bold and perfect song, 
when he cares to use it, and with some 
harp-strings fetched from a higher hcavem 
He contains the future, as he came out ot 
the past. In Plato, you explore modern 
Europe in its causes and seed - all that in 
thought, which the history of Europe 
embodies or has yet to embody. The 
well-informed man finds himself antici- 
pated. Plato is up with him too. Nothing 
has escaped him. Every new crop in tho 
fertile harvest of reform, every fresh sug- 
gestion of modern humanity, is there. 
If the student wish to see both sides, and 
justice done to the man of the world, 
pitiless exposure of pedants, and tho 
supremacy of truth and the religious sen- 
timent, he shall be contented also. Why 
should not young men be educated on 
this book ? It would suffice for the tuition 
of the race — to test their understanding, 
and to express their reason. Here is that 
which is so attractive to all men — the 
litei ature of aristocracy shall I call it ? — 
the picture of the best persons, senti- 
ments, and manners, by the first master, 
in the best times— portraits of Pericles, 
Alcibiades, Crito, Prodicus, Protagoras, 
Anaxagoras, and Socrates, with the lovely 
background of tho Athenian and suburban 
landscape. Or who can over-estimate 
the images with which Plato has enriched 
minds ol men, and which pass like 



BOOKS. 


tonllion in the currency of all nations ? 
Read the “ Phsedo,” the “ Protagoras,” 
the “ Phaedrus,” the ” Timaeus,” the ” Re- 
public,” and the ‘‘Apology of Socrates.” 
5. Plutarch cannot be spared from the 
smallest library ; first, because he is so 
readable, which is much ; then, that he is 
medicinal and invigorating. The lives of 
Cimon, Lycurgus, Alexander, Demos 
thenes, Phocion, Marcellus, and the rest 
are what history has of best. But this 
book has taken care of itself, and the 
opinion of the world is expressed in the 
innumerable cheap editions, which make 
it as accessible as a newspaper. But 
Plutarch’s “ Morals ” is less known, and 
Bcldom reprinted. Yet such a reader as 
I am writing to can as ill spare it as the 
” Lives.” He will read in it the essays 

On the Daemon of .Socrates,” ” On Isis 
and Osiris,” ” On Progress in Virtue,” 
‘‘On Garrulity,” “On Love,” and thank 
anew the art of printing, and the cheerful 
domain of ancient thinking. Plutarch 
charms by the facility of his associations ; 
so that it signifies little where you open 
his book, you find yourself at the Olympian 
tables. His memory is like the Isthmian 
Games, where all that was excellent in 
Greece was assembled, and you are sti- 
mulated and recruited by lyric verses, by 
philosophic sentiments, by the forms and 
behaviour of heroes, by the worsliip of 
the gods, and by the passing of fillets, 
parsley and laurel wreaths, chariots, 
armour, sacred cups, and utensils of sacri- 
fice. An inestimable trilogy of ancient 
social juctures are the three ” Banquets” 
respectively of Plato, Xenophon, and 
Plutarch. Plutarch’s has the least ap- 
proach to historical accuracy; but the 
meeting of the Seven Wise Masters is a 
charming portraiture of ancient manners 
and discourse, and is as clear as the voice 
of a fife, and entertaining as a French 
novel. Xenophon’s delineation of Athenian 
manners is an accessory to Plato, and 
supplies traits of Socrates ; whilst Plato’s 
has merits of every kind — being a reper- 
tory of the wisdom of the ancients on the 
subject of love — a picture of a feast of 
wits, not less descriptive than Aristo- 
phanes — and, lastly, containing that 
ironical eulogy of Socrates which is the 
source from which all the portraits of 
that philosopher current in Europe have 
been drawn. 

Of course a certain outline should be 
obtained of Greek history, in which the 
Important moments and persons can be 
rightly set down ; but the shortest ia the 


451 

best, and if one lacks stomach for Mr, 
Grote’s voluminous annals, the old slight 
and popular summary of Goldsmith or of 
Gillies will serve. The valuable part is 
the age of Pericles and the next genera- 
tion. And here we must read the ” Clouds ” 
of Aristophanes, and tvhat more of that 
master we gain appeti le for, to learn our 
way in the streets of Athens, and to know 
the tyranny of Aristophanes, requiring 
more genius and sometimes not less 
cruelty than belonged to the ofticial com-* 
manders. Aristophanes is now very ac- 
cessible, with much valuable commentary, 
through the labours of Mitchell and Cart- 
wright. An excellent popular book is J. A, 
St. John’s ” Ancient Greece ” ; the '* Life 
and Letters ” of Niebuhr, even more than 
his Lectures, furnish leading views ; and 
Winckelmann, a Greek born out of due 
time, has become essential to an intimate 
knowledge of the Attic genius. The secret 
of the recent histories in German and in 
English is the discovery, owed first to 
Wolff, and later to Boeckh, that the sin- 
cere Greek history of that period must 
be drawn from Demosthenes, especially 
from the business orations, and from the 
comic poets. 

If we come down a little by natural 
steps from the master to the disciples, we 
have, six or seven centuries later, the 
Platonists — who also cannot be skipped — - 
Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Synesius, 
Jamblichns. Of Jamblichus the Emperor 
Julian said, ” that he was posterior to 
Idato in time, not in genius.” Of Plotinus, 
we have eulogies by Porphyry and Long- 
inus, and the favour of the Emperor Gal- 
lienus — indicating the respect he inspired 
among his contemporaries. If any one 
who had read with interest the ” Isis and 
Osiris ” of Plutarch should then read a 
chapter called ” Providence,” by Synesius, 
translated into English by Thomas Taylor, 
he will find it one of the majestic remains 
of literature, and, like one walking in the 
noblest of temples, will conceive new 
gratitude to his fellow-men, and a new 
estimate of their nobility. The imagina- 
tive scholar will find few stimulants to 
his brain like these writers. He has 
entered the Elysian fields ; and the grand 
and pleasing figures of gods and daemons 
and daemoniacal men, of the ” azonic ” 
and the ” aquatic gods,” daemons with 
fulgid eyeS; and all the rest of the Pla- 
tonic rhetoric, exalted a little under the 
African sun, sail before his eyes. The 
acolyte has mounted the tripod over the 
cave at Delphi; his heart dances, bis 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


45a 

sight is quickened. These guides speak 
of the gods with such depth and with 
such pictorial details, as if they had been 
bodily present at the Olympian feasts. 
The reader of these books makes new 
acquaintance with his own mind ; new 
regions of thought are opened. Jambli- 
chus’s '* Life of Pythagoras ” works more 
directly on the will than the others ; 
since Pythagoras was eminently a prac- 
tical person, the founder of a school of 
ascetics and socialists, a planter of 
colonies, and nowise a man of abstract 
studies alone. 

The respectable and sometimes excel- 
lent translations of Bohn’s Library have 
done for literature what railroads have 
done for internal intercourse. I do not 
hesitate to read all the books I have 
named, and all good books, in transla- 
tions. What is really best in any book is 
translatable— any real insight or broad 
human sentiment. Nay, I observe that, 
in our Bible, and other books of lofty 
moral tone, it seems easy and inevitable 
to render the rhythm and music of the 
original into phrases of equal melody. 
The Italians have a fling at translators — 
i tradiiori traduitori ; but I thank them. 
I rarely read any Latin, Greek, German, 
Italian, sometimes not a French book in 
the original, which I can procure in a 
good version. 1 like to be beholden to 
the great metropolitan English speech, 
the sea which receives tributaries from 
every region under heaven. I shoidd as 
soon think of swimming across Charles 
River when I wish to go to Boston, as of 
reading all my books in originals, when I 
have them rendered for mo in my motlier- 
tongiie. 

For history there is great choice of 
ways to bring the student through early 
Rome. If he can read Livy, he has a 
good book : but one of the short English 
compends, some Goldsmith or Ferguson, 
should be used, that will place in the 
cycle the bright stars of Plutarch. The 
poet Horace is the eye of the Augustan 
age ; Tacitus, the wisest of historians ; 
and Martial will give him Roman manners 
— and some very bad ones — in the early 
days of the Empire ; but Martial must be 
read, if read at all, in his own tongue. 
These will bring him to Gibbon, who will 
take him in charge, and convey him with 
abundant entertainment down — with 
notice of all remarkable objects on the 
way — through fourteen hundred years of 
time. He cannot spare Gibbon, with his 
vast reading— with such wit and coa- 


tinuity of mind, that, though never pro« 
found, his book is one of the conveniences 
of civilization, like the new railroad from 
ocean to ocean — and, I think, wil* be sura 
to send the reader to his “ Memoirs of 
Himself,” and the “Extracts from my 
Journal,” and “Abstracts of my Read- 
ings,” which will spur the laziest scholar 
to emulation of his prodigious perform- 
ance. 

Now having our idler safe down as far 
as the fall of Constantinople in 1453, ha 
is in very good courses ; for here are 
trusty hands waiting for him. The car- 
dinal facts of European history are soon 
learned. There is Dante’s poem, to open 
the Italian Republics of the Middle Age ; 
Dante’s ” Vita Nuova,” to explain Dante 
and Beatrice ; and Boccaccio’s “ Life of 
Dante ” — a great man to describe a 
greater. To help us, perhaps a volume 
or two of M. Sismondi’s ” Italian Repub- 
lics ” will be as good as the entire six- 
teen. When we come to Michael Angelo, 
his Sonnets and Letters must bo read, 
with his Life by Vasari, or, in our day, 
by Herman Grimm. For the Church 
and the Feudal Institution, Mr. Hallam’s 
“Middle Ages” will furnish, if super- 
ficial, yet readable and conceivable out- 
lines. 

The “ Life of the Emperor Charles V.,“ 
by the useful Robertson, is still the key 
of the following age. Ximenos, Columbus, 
Loyola, Luther, Erasmus, Melanchthon,* 
Francis L, Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and 
Henry IV, of France, are his contem- 
poraries, It is a time of seeds and ex- 
pansions, whereof our recent civilization 
is the fruit. 

If now the relations of England to 
European affairs bring him to British 
ground, he is arrived at the very moment 
when modern history takes now propor- 
tions. He can look back for the legends 
and mythology to the ” Younger Fidda ” 
and the “ Heimskringla ” of Snorro Stur- 
leson, to Mallet’s” Northern Antiquities,’* 
to Ellis’s ” Metrical Romances,” to 
Asser’s ” Life of Alfred ” and Venerable 
Bede, and to the researches of Sharon 
TuiT*'r and Palgrave. Hume will serve 
him for an intelligent guide, and in the 
Elizabethan era he is at the richest period 
of the English mind, with the chief men 
of action and of thought which that 
nation has produced, and with a pregnant 
future before him. Here he has Shake- 
speare, Spenser, Sidney, Raleigh, Bacon, 
Chapman, Jonson, Ford, Beaumont and 
Fietcher, Her'^ert, Doone, Herrick ; aud 



BOOKS, 


Milton, Marvell, and Dryden, not long 
after. 

In reading history, he is to prefer the 
history of individuals. He will not repent 
the time he gives to Bacon — not if he 
read the “ Advancement of Learning,” 
the “ Essays,” the ” Novum Organum,” 
the ” History of Henry VII.,” and then 
nil the ” Letters ” (especially those 
to the Earl of Devonshire, explain- 
ing the Essex business), and all but his 
” Apophthegms.” 

The task is aided by the strong mutual 
light which these men shed on each other. 
Thus, the works of Ben Jonson are a sort 
of hoop to bind all these fine persons 
together, and to the land to which they 
belong. He has written verses to or on 
all his notable contemporaries ; and what 
with so many occasional poems, and the 
portrait sketches in his ” Discoveries,” 
and the gossiping record of his opinions 
in his conversations with Drummond of 
Hawthornden, he has really illustrated 
the England of his time, if not to the 
same extent, yet much in the same way, 
as Walter Scott has celebrated the persons 
and places of Scotland. Walton, Chap- 
man, Herrick, and Sir Henry Wotton 
write also to the times. 

Among the best books are certain Auto- 
biographies : as, St. Augustine’s Confes- 
sions ; Benvenuto Cellini’s Life ; Mon- 
taigne’s Essays ; Lord Herbert of Cher- 
bury's Memoirs ; Memoirs of the Car- 
dinal de Retz | Rousseau’s Confessions ; 
Linnaeus’s Diary; Gibbon’s, Hume’s, 
Franklin’s, Burn’s, Alfieri’s, Goethe’s, 
and Haydon’s Autobiographies. 

Another class of books closely allied to 
these, and of like interest, are those 
which may be called Table-Talks: of 
which the best are Saadi’s Gulistan ; 
Luther’s Table-Talk; Aubrey^s Lives; 
Spence's Anecdotes ; Selden’s Table- 
Talk ; I^.osweH’s Life of Johnson ; Ecker- 
mann’s Conversations with Goethe ; 
Coleridge’s Table-Talk ; and Hazlitt’s 
Life of Northcote. 

There is a class whose value I should 
designate as Favourites : such as Frois- 
sart’s Chronicles ; Southey’s Chronicle of 
the Cid ; Cervantes ; Sully’s Memoirs ; 
Rabelais ; Montaigne ; Izaak Walton ; 
Evelyn ; Sir Thomas Browne ; Aubrey ; 
Sterne ; Horace Walpole ; Lord Claren- 
don ; Dr. Johnson ; Burke, shedding 
floods of light on his times ; Lamb, 
Landor, and De Quincey — a list, of 
course, that may easily be swelled, as 
dependent on individual caprice. Many 


453 

f men are as tender and irritable as loverfl 
in reference to these predilections. In- 
I deed, a man’s library is a sort of harem, 
and I observe that tender readers have a 
great pudency in showing their books to a 
stranger. 

The annals of bibliography afford many 
examples of the delirious extent to which 
book-fancying can go, when the legitimate 
delight in a book is transferred to a rare 
edition or to a manuscript. This mania 
reached its height about the beginning of 
the present century. For an autograph 
of Shakespear one hundred and fifty-five 
guineas were given. In May, 1812, the 
library of the Duke of Roxburgh was sold. 
The sale lasted forty-two days — wa 
abridge the story from Dibdin— and 
among the many curiosities was a copy 
of Boccaccio published by Valdarfer, at 
Venice, in 1471 ; the only perfect copy of 
this edition. Among the distinguished 
company which attended the sale were 
the Duke of Devonshire, Earl Spencer, 
and the Duke of Marlborough, then Mar- 
quis of Blandford, The bid stood at five 
hundred guineas. ” A thousand guineas,” 
said Earl Spencer: “And ten,” added 
the Marquis. You might hear a pin drop. 
All eyes were bent on the bidders. Now 
they talked apart, now ate a biscuit, now 
made a bet, but without the least thought 
of yielding one to the other. But to pass 
over some details — the contest proceeded 
until the Marquis said, ‘‘Two thousand 
pounds.” The Earl Spencer bethought 
him like a prudent general of useless 
bloodshed and waste of powder, and had 
paused a quarter of a minute, when Lord 
Althorp with long steps came to his side, 
as if to bring his father a fresh lance to 
renew the fight. Father and son whis- 
pered together, and Earl Spencer ex- 
claimed, “Two thousand two hundred 
and fifty pounds ! ” An electric shock 
went through the assembly. “ And ten,” 
quietly added the Marquis. There ended 
the strife. Ere Evans let the hammer 
fall he paused ; the ivory instrument 
swept the air ; the spectators stood dumb, 
when the hammer fell. The stroke of its 
fall sounded on the farthest shores of 
Italy. The tap of that hammer was 
heard in the libraries of Rome, Milan, 
and Venice. Boccaccio stirred in his 
sleep of five hundred years, and M. Van 
Praet groped in vain among the royal 
alcoves in Paris, to detect a copy of the 
famed Valdarfer Boccaccio. 

Another class I distinguish by the term 
Vocabularies, Burton’s ” Anatomy pf 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE, 


454 

Melancholy ” is a book of great learning. 
To read it is like reading in a dic- 
tionary. ‘Tis an inventory to remind 
us how many classes and species of 
facts exist, and, in observing into what 
strange and multiplex by-ways learning 
has strayed, to infer our opulence. 
Neither is a dictionary a bad book to 
read. There is no cant in it, no excess 
of explanation, and it is full of sugges- 
tion — the raw material of possible poems 
and histories. Nothing is wanting but a 
little shuffling, sorting, ligature, and car- 
tilage. Out of a hundred examples, 
Cornelius Agrippa “ On the Vanity of 
Arts and Sciences ” is a specimen of that 
acribatiousness which grew to be the 
habit of the gluttonous readers of his 
time. Like the modern Germans, they 
read a literature, while other mortals 
read a few books. They read voraciously, 
and must disburden themselves ; so they 
take any general topic, as, Melancholy, 
or Praise of Science, or Praise of Folly, 
and write and quote without method or 
end. Now and then out of that affluence 
of their learning comes a fine sentence 
from Theophrastus, or Seneca, or Boe- 
thius, but no high method, no inspiring 
efflux. But one cannot afford to read for 
a few sentences ; they are good only as 
strings of suggestive words. 

There is another class, more needful to 
the present age, because the currents of 
custom run now in another direction, and 
leave us dry on this side — I mean the 
Dnaginative, A right metaphysics should 
do justice to the co-ordinate powers of 
Imagination, Insight, Understanding, and 
Will. Poetry, with its aids of Mythology 
and Romance, must be well allowed for 
an imaginative creature. Men are ever 
lapsing into a beggarly habit, wherein 
everything that is not ciphering, that is, 
which does not serve the tyrannical 
animal, is hustled out of sight. Our 
orators and writers are of the same 
poverty, and, in this rag-fair, neither the 
Imagination, the great awakening power, 
nor the Morals, creative of genius and of 
men, af© addressed. But though orator 
and poet be of this hungry party, the 
capacities remain. We must have sym- 1 
bols. The child asks you for a story, and 
is thankful for the poorest. It is not 
poor to him, but radiant with meaning. 
The man asks for a novel — that is, asks 
leave for a few hours to be a poet, and to 
paint things as they ought to be. The 
youth asks for a poem. The very dunces 
wish to go to the theatre. What private 


heavens can we not open, by yielding to 
all the suggestion of rich music! We 
must have idolatries, mythologies — some 
swing and verge for the creative power 
lying coiled and cramped here, driving 
ar dent natures to insanity and crime if it 
do not find vent. Without the great arts 
which speak to the sense of beauty, a 
man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering 
creature. These are his becoming drape- 
ries, which warm and adorn him. Whilst 
the prudential and economical tone of 
society starves the imagination, affronted 
Nature gets such indemnity as she may. 
The novel is that allowance and frolic the 
imagination finds. F.verything else pins 
it down, and men flee for redress to 
Byron, Scott, Disraeli, Dumas, Sand, 
Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, and Reade. 
Their education is neglected ; but the 
circulating library and the theatre, as 
well as the trout-fishing, the Notch 
Mountains, the Adirondack country, the 
tour to Mont Blanc, to the White Hills, 
and the Ghauts, make such amends as 
they can. 

The imagination infuses a certain vola- 
tility and intoxication. It has a flute 
which sets the atoms of our frame in a 
dance, like planets ; and, once so liba 
rated, the whole man reeling drunk to the 
music, they never quite subside to their 
old stony state. But what is the imagi- 
nation ? Only an arm or weapon of the 
interior energy ; only the precursor of the 
reason. And books that treat the old 
pedantries of the world, our times, places, 
professions, customs, opinions, histories,, 
with a certain freedom, and distribute 
things, not after the usages of America 
and Europe, but after the laws of right 
reason, and with as daring a freedom as 
we use in dreams, put us on our feet again, 
enable us to form an original judgment of 
our duties, and suggest new thoughts for 
to-morrow. 

“Lucrezia Floriani,” “ Le Pech6 de M. 
Antoine,” ” Jeanne,” and “ Consuelo,” of 
George Sand, are great steps from the 
novel of one termination, which we all 
read twenty years ago. Yet how far off 
frrm life and manners and motives the 
. novel still is ! Life lies about us dumb ; 
the day, as we know it, has not yet found 
a tongue. These stories are to the plots 
of real life what the figures in “ La Belle 
Assembl6e,” which represent the fashion 
of the month, are to portraits. But the 
novel will find the way to our interiors 
one day, and will not always be the novel 
of costume merely. 1 do not think it in 



BOOKS. 


455 


operative now. So much novel-reading 
cannot leave the young men and maidens 
untouched : and doubtless it gives some 
ideal dignity to the day. The young study 
noble behaviour; and as the player in 
“ Consuelo ” insists that he and his col- 
leagues on the boards have taught princes 
the fine etiquette and strokes of grace and 
dignity which they practise with so much 
effect in their villas and among their de- 
pendants, so I often see traces of the 
Scotch or the French novel in the courtesy 
and brilliancy of young midshipmen, col- 
legians, and clerks. Indeed, when one 
observes how ill and ugly people make 
their loves and quarrels, ’tis pity they 
should not read novels a little more, to 
import the fine generosities, and the clear, 
firm conduct which are as becoming in the 
unions and separations which love effects 
under shingle roofs as in palaces and 
among illustrious personages. 

In novels the most serious questions are 
beginning to be discussed. What made 
the popularity of “ Jane Eyre,” but that a 
central question was answered in some 
sort? The question there answered in 
regard to a vicious marriage will always 
be treated according to the habit of the 
party. A person of commanding indi- 
vidualism will answer it as Rochester does 
•~-as Cleopatra, as Milton, as George Sand 
do — magnifying the exception into a rule, 
dwarfing the world into an exception, A 
person of less courage, that is, of less con- 
stitution, will answer as the heroine does 
— giving way to fate, to conventionalism, 
to the actual state and doings of men and 
women. 

For the most part, our novel-reading is 
a passion for results. We admire parks, 
and high-born beauties, and the homage 
of drawing-rooms, and parliaments. They 
make us sceptical by giving prominence 
to wealth and social position. 

I remember when some peering eyes of 
boys discovered that the oranges hanging 
on the boughs of an orange-tree in a gay 
piazza were tied to the twigs by thread. I 
fear ’tis so with the novelist’s prosperities. 
Nature has a magic by which she fits the 
man to his fortunes, by making them the 
fruit of his character. But the novelist 
plucks this event here, and that fortune 
there, and ties them rashly to his figures, 
to tickle the fancy of his readers with a 
cloying success, or scare them with shocks 
of tragedy. And so, on the whole, ’tis a 
juggle. We are cheated into laughter or 
wonder by feats which only oddly combine i 
that WQ do evqry day. There ig ao I 


new element, no power, no furtherance. 
'Tis only confectionery, not the raising of 
new corn. Great is the poverty of their 
inventions. She was beautiful, and he fell 
in love. Money, and killing, and the Wan- 
dering Jew, and persuading the lover that 
his mistress is betrothed to another — these 
are the main-springs ; new names, but no 
new qualities in the men and women. 
Hence the vain endeavour to keep any bit 
of this fairy gold, which has rolled like a 
brook through our hands. A thousand 
thoughts awoke ; great rainbows seemed 
to span the sky — a morning among the 
mountains — but we close the book, and 
not a ray remains in the memory of 
evening. But this passion for romance, 
and this disappointment, show how much 
we need real elevations and pure poetry : 
that which shall show us, in morning and 
night, in stars and mountains, and in all 
the plight and circumstance of men, the 
analogons of our own thoughts, and a like 
impression made by a just book and by 
the face of Nature. 

If our times are sterile in genius, we 
must cheer us with books of rich and 
believing men who had atmosphere and 
amplitude about them. Every good fable, 
every mythology, every biography from a 
religious age, every passage of love, and 
even philosophy and science, when they 
proceed from an intellectual integrity, and 
are not detached and critical, have the 
imaginative element. The Greek fables, 
the Persian history (Firdusi), the ” Younger 
Edda ” of the Scandinavians, the ” Chroni- 
cle of the Cid,” the poem of Dante, the 
Sonnets of Michael Angelo, the English 
drama of Shakspeare, Beaumont and 
Fletcher, and Ford, and even the prose of 
Bacon and Milton — in our time, the Ode 
of Wordsworth, and the poems and the 
prose of Goethe, have this enlargement, 
and inspire hope and generous attempts. 

There is no room left — and yet I might 
as well not have begun as to leave out a 
class of books which are the best ; I mean 
the Bibles of the world, or the sacred books 
of each nation, which express for each the 
supreme result of their experience. After 
the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, which 
constitute the sacred books of Christen- 
dom, these are, the Desatir of the Persians, 
and the Zoroastrian Oracles; the Vedas 
and Laws of Menu ; the Upanishads ths 
Vishnu Purana, the Bhagvat Geeta, of 
the Hindoos ; the books of the Buddhists ; 
the “Chinese Classics,” of four books, 
containing the wisdom of Confucius and 
Mencius. Also such other books as have 
2 Q 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


456 

acquired a semi -canonical authority in 
the world, as expressing the highest senti- 
ment and hope of nations, Such are the 
“ Hermes Trismegistus," pretending to be 
Egyptian remains ; the “ Sentences ” of 
Epictetus ; of Marcus Antoninus ; the 
“Vishnu Sarma" of the Hindoos; the 
“ Gulistan ” of Saadi ; the “ Imitation of 
Christ,” of Thomas a Kempis ; and the 
“ Thoughts ” of Pascal. 

All these books are the majestic expres- 
sions of the universal conscience, and are 
more to our daily purpose than this year's 
almanac or this day’s newspaper. But 
they are for the closet, and to be read on 
the bended knee. Their communications 
are not to be given or taken with the lips 
and the end of the tongue, but out of the 
glow of the cheek, and with the throbbing 
heart. Friendship should give and take, 
solitude and time brood and ripen, heroes 
absorb and enact them. They are not to 
be held by letters printed on a page, but 
are living characters translatable into 
every tongue and form of life. I read 
them on lichens and bark ; I watch them 
on waves on the beach ; they fly in birds, 
they creep in worms ; I detect them in 
laughter and blushes, and eye-sparkles of 
men and women. These are Scriptures 
which the missionary might well carry 
over prairie, desert, and ocean, to Siberia, 
Japan, Timbuctoo. Yet he will find that 
the spirit which is in them journeys faster 
than he, and greets him on his arrival — 
was there already long before him. The 
missionary must be carried by it, and find 
it there, or he goes in vain. Is there any 
geography in these things ? We call them 
Asiatic, we call them primeval ; but per- 
haps that is only optical ; for Nature is 
always equal to herself, and there are as 
good eyes and ears now in the planet as 


ever were. Only these ejaculations of th« 
soul are uttered one 01 a few a time, at 
long intervals, and it takes millenniums to 
make a Bible. 

These are a few of the books which the 
old and the later times have yielded us, 
which will reward the time spent on 
them. In comparing the number of good 
books with the shortness of life, many 
might well be read by proxy, if we had 
good proxies ; and it would be well for 
sincere young men to borrow a hint from 
the French Institute and the British 
Association, and, as they divide the whole 
body into sections, each of which sits 
upon and reports of certain matters con- 
fided to it, so let each scholar associate 
himself to such persons as he can rely on 
in a literary club, in which each shall 
undertake a single work or series for 
which he is qualified. For example, how 
attractive is the whole literature of the 
“ Roman de la Rose,” the “ Fabliaux,” 
and thQ gait science of the French Trouba- 
dours I Yet who in Boston has time for 
that ? But one of our company shall 
undertake it, shall study and master it, 
and shall report on it, as under oath ; 
shall give us the sincere result, as it lies 
In his mind, adding nothing, keeping 
nothing back. Another member, mean- 
time, shall as honestly search, sift, and as 
truly report, on British Mythology, the 
Round Table, the histories of Brut, 
Merlin, and Welsh poetry; a third on the 
Saxon Chronicles, Robert of Gloucester, 
and William of Malmesbury; a fourth, on 
Mysteries, Early Drama, “ Gesta Romano- 
rum,” Collier, and Dyce, and the Camden 
Society. Each shall give us his grains ot 
gold, after the washing; and every other 
shall then decide whether this is a book 
indispensable to him also. 


CLUBS. 


We are delicate machines, and require 
nice treatment to get from us the maxi- 
mum of power and pleasure. We need 
tonics, but must have those that cost little 
or CO reaction. The flame of life burns 
too fast in pure oxygen, and nature has 
tempered the air with nitrogen. So 
thought is the native air of the mind, yet 
pure it is a poison to our mixed constitu- 
tion, and soon burns up the bone-house 
of man, unless tempered with affection 
aind coarse practice in the material world. 
Varied foods, climates, beautiful objects 


— and especially the alternation of a large 
variety of objects — are the necessity of 
this exigent system of ours. But our 
tonics, our luxuries, are force-pumps 
which exhaust the strength they pretend 
to supply ; and of all the cordials known 
to us, the best, safest, and most exhilar- 
ating, with the least harm, is society; 
and every healthy and efficient mind 
passes a large part of life in the company 
most easy to him. 

We seek society with very different 
aims, and the staple of conversation is 



CLUBS. 




widely unlike in its circles. Sometimes 
it is facts— running from those of daily 
necessity to the last results of science — 
and has all degrees of importance ; some- 
times it is love, and makes the balm of 
our early and of our latest days ; some- 
times it is thought, as from a person who 
is a mind only ; sometimes a singing, as 
if the heart poured out all like a bird ; 
sometimes experience. With some men 
it is a debate ; at the approach of a 
dispute they neigh like horses. Unless 
there bo an argument, they think nothing 
is doing. Some talkers excel in the pre- 
cision with which they formulate their 
thoughts, so that you get from them 
somewhat to remember ; others lay 
criticism asleep by a charm. Especially 
women use words that are not words — as 
steps in a dance are not steps — but re- 
produce the genius of that they speak of ; 
as the sound of some bells makes us think 
of the bell merely, whilst the church- 
chimes in the distance brings the church 
and its serious memories before us. 
Opinions are accidental in people, have a 
poverty-stricken air. A man valuing him- 
self as the organ of this or that dogma is 
a dull companion enough ; but opinion 
native to the speaker is sweet and refresh- 
ing, and inseparable from his image. 
Neither do we by any means always go to 
people for conversation, How often to 
cay nothing, and yet must go ; as a child 
will long for his companions, but among 
them plays by himself. 'Tis only pre- 
sence which we want. But one thing is 
certain — at some rate, intercourse we 
must have. The experience of retired 
men is positive — that we lose our days 
and are barren of thought for want of 
some person to talk with. The under- 
standing can no more empty itself by its 
own action than can a deal box. 

The clergyman walks from house to 
house all day all the year to give people 
the comfort of good talk. The physician 
helps them mainly in the same way, by 
healthy talk giving a right tone to the 
patient’s mind. The dinner, the walk, 
the fireside, all have that for their main 
end. 

See how Nature has secured the com- 
munication of knowledge. 'Tis certain 
that money does not more burn in a boy’s 
pocket than a piece of news burns in our 
memory until we can tell it. And, in 
higher activity of mind, every new per- 
ception is attended with a thrill of 
pleasure, and the imparting of it to others 
Is also attended with pleasure. Thought 


457 

is the child of the intellect, fcad this child 
is conceived with joy and born with joy. 

Conversation is the laboratory and 
workshop of the student. The affection 
or sympathy helps. The wish to speak to 
the want of another mind assists to clear 
your own. A certain truth possesses us, 
which we in all ways strive to utter. 
Every time we say a thing in conversation, 
we get a mechanical advantage in detach- 
ing it well and delivery. I prise the 
mechanics of conversation. ’Tis pulley 
and lever and screw. To fairly disengage 
the mass, and send it jingling down, a 
good boulder — a block of quartz and gold, 
to be worked up at leisure in the useful 
arts of life — is a wonderful relief. 

What are the best days in memory ? 
Those in which we met a companion who 
was truly such. How sweet those hours 
when the day was not long enough to 
communicate and compare our intellec- 
tual jewels, the favourite passages of each 
book, the proud anecdotes of our heroes, 
the delicious verses we had hoarded ! 
What a motive had then our solitary 
days 1 How the countenance of our 
friend still left some light after he had 
gone f We remember the time when the 
best gift we could ask of fortune was to 
fall in with a valuable companion in a 
ship’s cabin, or on a long journey in the 
old stage-coach, where, each passenger 
being forced to know every other, and 
other employments being out of the 
question, conversation naturally flowed, 
people became rapidly acquainted, and, 
if well adapted, more intimate in a day 
than if they had been neighbours for 
years. 

In youth, in the fury of curiosity and 
acquisition, the day is too short for books 
and the crowd of thoughts, and we are 
impatient of interruption. Later, when 
books tire, thought has a more languid 
flow ; and the days come when we are 
alarmed, and say there are no thoughts. 
“ What a barren-witted pate is mine I ” 
the student says; “I will go and leam 
whether I have lost my reason.” He seeks 
intelligent persons, whether more wise or 
less wise than he, who give him provoca- 
tion, and at once and easily the old 
motion begins in his brain: thoughts, 
fancies, humours, flow ; the clouds lift ; 
the horizon broadens; and the infinite 
opulence of things is again shown him. 
But the right conditions must be observed. 
Mainly he must have leave to be himself, 
Sancho Panza blessed the man who in- 
vented sleep. So 1 prize the good imen* 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


«8 

tion whereby everybody is provided with 
somebody who is glad to see him. 

If men are less when together than they 
are alone, they are also in some respects 
enlarged. They kindle each other; and 
such is the power of suggestion, that each 
sprightly story calls out more ; and some- 
times a fact that had long slept in the 
recesses of memory hears the voice, is 
welcomed to daylight, and proves of rare 
value. Every metaphysician must have 
observed, not only that no thought is 
alone, but that thoughts commonly go in 
pairs ; though the related thoughts first 
appeared in his mind at long distances of 
time. Things are in pairs : a natural fact 
has only half its value, until a fact in 
moral nature, its counterpart, is stated. 
Then they confirm and adorn each other ; 
a story is matched by another story. 
And that may be the reason why, when a 
gentleman has told a good thing, he im- 
mediately tells it again. 

Nothing seems so cheap as the benefit 
of conversation: nothing is more rare. 
'Tis wonderful how you are balked and 
baffled. There is plenty of intelligence, 
reading, curiosity ; but serious, happy 
discourse, avoiding personalities, dealing 
with results, is rare: and I seldom meet 
with a reading and thoughtful person but 
he tells me, as if it were his exceptional 
mishap, that he has no companion. 

Suppose such a one to go out exploring 
different circles in search of this wise and 
genial counterpart — he might inquire far 
and wide. Conversation in society is 
found to be on a platform so low as to 
exclude science, the saint, and the poet. 
Amidst all the gay banter, sentiment 
cannot profane itself and venture out. 
The reply of old Isocrates comes so often 
to mind — “ The things which are now 
seasonable I cannot say; and for the 
things which I can say it is not now the 
time.” Be.sides, who can resist the charm 
of talent ? The lover of letters loves 
power too. Among the men of wit and 
learning, he could not withhold his homage 
from the gayety, grasp of memory, luck, 
splendour, and speed ; such exploits of 
discourse, such feats of society! What 
new powers, what mines of weadth 1 But 
when he came home, his brave sequins 
were dry leaves. He found either that 
the fact they had thus dizened and 
adorned was of no value, or that he 
already knew all and more than all they 
had told him. He could not find that he 
was helped by so much as one thought or 
I^ri09ipl6i oae solid facti ono vommapdipg 


impulse ; great was the dazzle, but the 
gain was small. He use& his occasions ; 
he seeks the company of those who have 
convivial talent. But the moment they 
meet, to be sure they begin to be some- 
thing else than they were; they play 
pranks, dance jigs, run on each other, 
pun, tell stories, try many fantastic tricks 
under some superstition that there mus 
be excitement and elevation — and they 
kill conversation at once. I know well 
the rusticity of the shy hermit. No doubt 
he does not make allowance enough for 
men of more active blood and habit. But 
it is only on natural ground that conver- 
sation can be rich. It must not begin 
with uproar and violence. Let it keep 
the ground, let it feel the connection with 
the battery. Men must not be off their 
centres. 

Some men love only to talk where they 
are masters. They like to go to school- 
girls, or to boys, or into the shops where 
the sauntering people gladly lend an ear 
to anyone. On these terms they give 
information, and please themselves by 
sallies and chat which are admired by 
the idlers ; and the talker is at his ease 
and jolly, for he can walk out without 
ceremony when he pleases. They go 
rarely to their equals, and then as for 
their own convenience simply, making 
too much haste to introduce and impart 
their new whim or discovery ; listen badly, 
or do not listen to the comment or to the 
thought by which the company strive to 
repay them ; rather, as soon as their own 
speech is done, they take their hats. Then 
there are the gladiators, to whom it is 
always a battle ; 'tis no matter on which 
side, they fight for victory ; then the 
heady men, the egotists, the monotones, 
the steriles, and the impracticables, 

It does not help tliat you find as good 
or a better man than yourself, if he is not 
timed and fitted to you. The greatest 
sufferers are often those who have the 
most to say — men of a delicate sympathy, 
who are dumb in mixed company. Able 
people, if they do not know how to make 
allowance for them, paralyze them. One 
of those conceited prigs who value nature 
only as it feeds and exhibits them is 
equally a pest with the roysterers. Thera 
must be large reception as well as giving, 
How delightful after these disturbers is 
the radiant, playful wit of— one whom I 
need not name — for in every society there 
is his representative. Good-nature is 
stronger than tomahawks. His conversa- 
tioo ftl) pictures; be can reproduQS 



CLUBS. 


whatever he has seen ; ho tells the best 
Btory in the county, and is cf such genial 
temper that ho disposes all others irre- 
sistibly to good-humour and discourse, 
Diderot said of the Abb6 Galiani : “ He 
was a treasure in rainy days ; and if the 
cabinet-makers made such things, every- 
body would have one in the country.” 

One lesson we learn early— that, in spite 
of seeming differences, men are all of one 
pattern. We readily assume this without 
mates, and are disappointed and angry if 
we find that we are premature, and that 
their watches are slower than ours. In 
fact, the only sin which we never forgive 
in each other is difference of opinion. We 
know beforehand that yonder man must 
think as we do. Has he not two hands — 
tv;o feet — hair and nails ? Does he not 
eat — bleed — laugh — cry? His dissent from 
me is the veriest affectation. This con- 
clusion is at once the logic of persecution 
and of love. And the ground of our indig- 
nation is our conviction that his dissent is 
some wilfulness he practises on himself. 
He checks the flow of his opinion as the 
cross cow holds up her milk. Yes, and we 
look into his eye, and see that he knows it 
and hides his eye from ours. 

But to come a little nearer to my mark, 

I am to say that there may easily be ob- 
stacles in the way of finding the pure 
article we are in search of; but when we 
find it, it is worth the pursuit, for beside 
its comfort as medicine and cordial, once 
in the right company, new and vast values 
do not fail to appear. All that man can 
do for man is to be found in that market. 
There are great prizes in this game. Our 
fortunes in the world are as our mental 
equipment for this competition is. Yonder 
is a man who can answer the questions 
which I cannot. Is it so ? Hence comes 
to me boundless curiosity to know his 
experiences and his wit. Hence compe- 
tition for the stakes dearest to man. What 
is a match at whist, or draughts, or bil- ; 
liards, or chess, to a match of mother-wit, 
of knowledge, and of resources ? However 
courteously we conceal it, it is social rank 
and spiritual power that are compared ; | 
whether in the parlour, the courts, the 
caucus, the senate, or the chamber of 
science — which are only less or larger 
theatres for this competition. 

He that can define, he that can answer 
a question so as to admit of no further 
answer, is the best man. This was the 
meaning of the story of the Sphinx. In 
the old time conundrums were sent from 
king to king by ambassadors, The seven 


450 

I wise masters at Periahder’s bahqtiet spent 
their time in answering them. The life of 
I Socrates is a propounding and a solution 
of these. So, in the hagiology of each 
nation, the lawgiver was in each case some 
man of eloquent tongue, whose sympathy 
brought him face to face with the ex- 
tremes of society. Jesus, Menu, the first 
Buddhist, Mahomet, Zertusht, Pythagoras, 
are examples, 

Jesus spent his life in discoursing with 
humble people on life and duty, in giving 
wise answers, showing that he saw at a 
larger angle of vision, and at least silenc- 
ing those who were not generous enough 
to accept his thoughts. Luther spent his 
life so ; and it is not his theologic works 
— his ” Commentary on the Galatians,” 
and the rest, but his ” Table-Talk,” which 
is still read by men. Dr. Johnson was a 
man of no profound mind — full of Eng- 
ish limitations, English politics, English 
Church, Oxford philosophy ; yet having a 
large heart, mother- wit, and good sense, 
which impatiently overleaped his custo- 
mary bounds, his conversation as reported 
by Boswell has a lasting charm. Conver- 
sation is the vent of character as well as 
of thought; and Dr. Johnson impresses 
his company, not only by the point of the 
remark, but also, when the point fails, 
because he makes it. His obvious re- 
ligion or superstition, his deep wish that 
they should think so or so, weighs with 
them — so rare is depth of feeling, or a 
constitutional value for a thought or 
opinion, among the light-minded men and 
women who make up society ; and though 
they know that there is in the speaker a 
degree of shortcoming, of insincerity, and 
of talking for victory, yet the existence of 
character, and habitual reverence for prin- 
ciples over talent or learning, is felt by 
the frivolous. 

One of the best records of the great 
German master, who towered over all his 
contemporaries in the first thirty years 
of this century, is his conversations as re- 
corded by Eckermann ; and the ” Table- 
Talk ” of Coleridge is one of the best 
remains of his genius. 

In the Norse legends, the gods of Val- 
halla, when they meet the Jotuns, con- 
verse on the perilous terms that he who 
cannot answer the other’s questions for- 
feits his own life. Odin comes to the 
threshold of the Jotun Waftrhudnir in 
disguise, calling himself Gangrader ; is 
invited into the hall, and told that ho 
cannot go out thence unless he can answer 
every question Waftrhudnir shall put 



SOClBThr AND SOUTUbE. 


460 

Waftrhudnir asks him the name of the 
god of the sun, and of the god who brings 
the night ; what river separates the dwel- 
lings of the sons of the giants from those 
of the gods ; what plain lies between the 
i^ods Surtur, their adversary, etc. ; 

fill of which tne disguised Odin answers 
Catisfactorily. Then it is his turn to 
interrogate, and he is answered well for a 
time by the Jotun. At last he puts a 
question which none but himself could 
answer : “ What did Odin whisper in the 
ear of his son Balder when Balder mounted 
the funeral pile ? " The startled giant 
replies ; “ None of the gods knows what 
in the old time thou saidst in the ear of 
thy son : with death on my mouth have I 
spoken the fate-words of the generation 
of the -d?sir ; with Odin contended I in 
wise words. Thou must ever the wisest 
be.” 

And still the gods and giants are so 
known, and still they play the same game 
in all the million mansions of heaven and 
of earth; at all tables, clubs, and 
tHes, the lawyers in the court-house, the 
senators in the capitol, the doctors in the 
academy, the wits in the hotel. Best is 
he who gives an answer that cannot bo 
.answered again. Omnis definitio periculo- 
sa est, and only wit has the secret. The 
same thing took place when Leibnitz 
came to visit Newton ; when Schiller 
came to Goethe ; when France, in the 
person of Madame de Stael, visited Goethe 
and Schiller; when Hegel was the guest 
of Victor Cousin in Paris ; when Linnaeus 
was the guest of Jussieu. It happened 
many years ago, that an American chemist 
carried a letter of introduction to Dr. 
Dalton of Manchester, England, the author 
of the theory of atomic proportions, and 
was coolly enough received by the Doctor 
in the laboratory where he was engaged. 
Only Dr. Dalton scratched a formula on 
a scrap of paper and pushed it towards 
the guest — ‘‘ Had he seen that ? ” The 
visitor scratched on another paper a 
formula describing some results of his 
own with sulphuric acid, and pushed it 
across the table — “ Had he seen that ? ” 
The attention of the English chemist was 
instantly arrested, and they became 
rapidly acquainted. To answer a question 
so as to admit of no reply, is the test of a 
man — to touch bottom every time. Hyde, 
Earl of Rochester, asked Lord-Keeper 
Guilford, ** Do you not think I could un- 
derstand any business in England in a 
month ? ” " Yes, my lord,” replied the 
Other, *but I think you would under- 


1 stand it better in two months.” Whch 
I Edward I. claimed to be acknowledged by 
the Scotch (129c) as lord paramount, the 
nobles of Scotland replied, ” No answer 
can be made while the throne is vacant.” 
When Henry III. (1217) plead duress 
against his people demanding confirma- 
tion and execution of the Charter, the 
reply was: “ If this were admitted, civil 
wars could never close but by the ex- 
tirpation of one of the contending 
parties.” 

What can you do wi th one of these sharp 
respondents ? What can you do with an 
eloquent man ? No rules of debate, no 
contempt of court, no exclusions, no gag- 
laws can be contrived, that his first 
syllable will not set aside or overstep and 
annul. You can shut out the light, it may 
be ; but can you shut out gravitation ? 
You may condemn his book ; but can you 
fight against his thought ? That is always 
too nimble for you, anticipates you, and 
breaks out victorious in some other quar- 
ter. Can you stop the motion of good 
sense ? What can you do with Beau.' 
marchais, who converts the censor whom 
the court has appointed to stifie his play 
into an ardent advocate ? The court 
appoints another censor, who shall crush 
it this time, Beaumarchais persuades 
him to defend it. The court successively 
appoints three more severe inquisitors ; 
Beaumarchais converts them all into 
triumphant vindicators of the play which 
is to bring in the Revolution, Who can 
stop the mouth of Luther — of Newton 
— of Franklin — of Mirabeau — of Talley- 
rand ? 

These masters can make good their own 
place, and need no patron. Every variety 
of gift — science, religion, politics, letters, 
art, prudence, war, or love — has its vent 
and exchange in conversation. Conversa- 
tion is the Olympic games whither every 
superior gift resorts to assert and approve 
itself — and, of course, the inspiration of 
powerful and public men, with the rest. 
But it is not this class — whom the splen- 
dour of their accomplishment almost in- 
evitably guides into the vortex of ambition, 
makes them chancellors and commanders 
of council and of action, and makes them 
at last fatalists — not these whom we now 
consider. We consider those who are 
interested in thoughts, their own and 
other men’s, and who delight in compar- 
ing them, who think it the highest compli- 
ment they can pay a man, to deal with him 
as an intellect, to expose to him the grand 
and cheerful secrets perhaps never opened 



CLUBS. 


to their daily companions, to share with 
him the sphere of freedom and the sim- 
plicity of truth. 

But the best conversation is rare. So- 
ciety seems to have agreed to treat 
fictions as realities, and realities as 
fictions ; and the simple lover of truth, 
especially if on very high grounds — as a 
religious or intellectual seeker — finds him- 
self a stranger and alien. 

It is possible that the best conversation 
is between two persons who can talk only 
to each other. Even Montesquieu con- 
fessed that, in conversation, if he per- 
ceived he was listend to by a third person, 
it seemed to him from that moment the 
whole question vanished from his mind. 
I have known persons of rare ability who 
were heavy company to good, social men 
who knew well enough how to draw out 
others of retiring habit; and, moreover, 
were heavy to intellectual men wlio ought 
to have known them. And does it never 
occur that we, perhaps, live with people 
too superior to be seen — as there are 
musical notes too high for the scale of 
most ears ? There are men who are great 
only to one or two companions of more 
opportunity, or more adapted. 

It was to meet these wants that in all 
civil nations attempts have been made to 
organize conversation by bringing to- 
gether cultivated people under the most 
favourable conditions. ’Tis certain there 
was liberal and refined conversation in 
the Greek, in the Roman, and in the 
Middle Age. There was a time when in 
France a revolution occurred in domestic 
architecture ; when the houses of the 
nobility, which, up to that time, had been 
constructed on feudal necessities, in a 
hollow square — the ground- floor being 
resigned to ofiices and stables, and the 
floors above to rooms of state and to 
lodging-rooms — were rebuilt with new 
purpose. It was the Marchioness of 
Rambouillet who first got the horses out 
of and the scholars into the palaces, having 
constructed her hotel with a view to 
society, with superb suites of drawing- 
rooms on the same floor, and broke 
through the morgue of etiquette by invit- 
ing to her house men of wit and learning 
as well as men of rank, and piqued the 
emulation of Cardinal Richelieu to rival 
assemblies, and so to the founding of the 
French Academy. The history of the 
H 6 tel Rambouillet and its brilliant circles 
makes an important date in French 
civilization. And a history ot clubs from 
early antiquity, tracixxg the efforts to 


461 

secure liberal and refined conversation, 
through the Greek and Roman to the 
Middle Ago, and thence down through 
French, English, and German memoirs, 
tracing the clubs and coteries in each 
country, would be an important chapter 
in history. We know well the Mermaid 
Club, in London, of Shakespeare, Ben 
Jonson, Chapman, Herrick, Selden, Beau- 
mont and Fletcher; its “Rules” are 
preserved, and many allusions to their 
suppers are found in Jonson, Herrick, 
and in Aubrey. Anthony Wood has many 
details of Harrington’s Club. Dr. Bent- 
ley’s Club held Newton, Wren, Evelyn, 
and Locke; and we owe to Boswell our 
knowledge of the club of Dr. Johnson, 
Goldsmith, Burke, Gibbon, Reynolds, 
Garrick, Beauclerk, and Percy. And we 
have records of the brilliant society that 
Edinburgh boasted in the first decade of 
this century. Such societies are possible 
only in great cities, and are the compen- 
sation which these can make to their 
dwellers for depriving them of the free 
intercourse with Nature. Every scholar 
is surrounded by wiser men than he— if 
they cannot write as well. Cannot they 
meet and exchange results to their mutual 
benefit and delight ? It was a pathetic 
experience when a genial and accom- 
plished person said to me, looking from 
his country home to the capital of New 
England, “ There is a town of two hun- 
dred thousand people, and not a chair in 
it for me.” If he were sure to find at 
No. 2,000 Tremont Street what scholars 
were abroad after the morning studies 
were ended, Boston would shine as the 
New Jerusalem to hi,i eyes. 

Now this want of adapted society is 
mutual. The man of thought, the man 
of letters, the man of science, the ad- 
ministrator skilful -in affairs, the man of 
1 manners and culture; whom you so much 
wish to find — each of these is wishing to 
I be found. Each wishes to open his 
thought, his knowledge, his social skill to 
the daylight in your company and affec- 
tion, and to exchange his gifts for yours ; 
and the first hint of a select and intelli- 
gent company is welcome. 

But the club must be self-protecting, 
and obstacles arise at the outset. Thera 
are people who cannot well be cultivated, 
whom you must keep down and quiet if 
you can. There are those who have the 
instinct of a bat to fly against any lighted 
candle and put it out — marplots and con- 
tradictors, There are those who go only 
to talk, and those who go only to hear; 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


46a 

both are bad. A right rule for a club 
would be — Admit no man whose presence 
excludes any one topic. It requires 
people who are not surprised and shocked, 
who do and let do, and let be, who sink 
trifles, and know solid values, and who 
take a great deal for granted. 

It is always a practical difficulty with 
clubs to regulate the laws of election so 
as to exclude peremptorily every social 
nuisance. Nobody wishes bad manners. 
We must have loyalty and character. 
The poet Marvell was wont to say “ that 
he would not drink wine with any one 
with whom he could not trust his life.” 
But neither can we afford to be superfine. 
A man of irreproachable behaviour and 
excellent sense preferred on his travels 
taking his chance at a hotel for company, 
to the charging himself with too many 
select letters of introduction, He con- 
fessed he liked low company. He said 
the fact was incontestable, that the society 
of gypsies was more attractive than that 
of bishops. The girl deserts the parlour 
for the kitchen ; the boy, for the wharf. 
Tutors and parents cannot interest him 
like the uproarious conversation he finds 
in the market or the dock. I knew a scholar, 
of some experience in camps, who said 
that he liked, in a bar-room, to tell a few 
'coon stories, and put himself on a good 
footing with the company ; then he could 
be as silent as he chose. A scholar does 
not wish to be always pumping his brains : 
he wants gossips. The black-coats are 
good company only for black -coats ; but 
when the manufacturers, merchants, and 
«hip-masters meet, see how much they 
have to say, and how long the conversa- 
tion lasts ! They have come from many 
zones; they have traversed wide coun- 
tries ; they know each his own arts, and 
the cunning artisans of his craft ; they 
have seen the best and the worst of men. 
Their knowledge contradicts the popular 
opinion and your own on many points. 
Things which you fancy wrong they know 
to be right and profitable ; things which 
you reckon superstitious they know to be 
true. They have found virtue in the 
strangest homes ; and in the rich store of 
their adventures are instances and ex- 
amples which you have been seeking in 
vain for years, and which they suddenly 
and unwittingly offer you. 

I remember a social experiment in this 
direction, wherein it appeared that each 
of the members fancied he was in need of 
society, but himself unpresentable. On 
trial they all found that they could be 


tolerated by, and ebuld tolerate, each 
other. Nay, the tendency to extreme 
self-respect which hesitated to join in a 
club was running rapidly down to abject 
admiration cf each other, when the club 
was broken up by new combinations. 

The use of the hospitality of the club 
hardly needs explanation. Men are un- 
bent and sociable at table ; and I remem- 
ber it was explained to me, in a Southern 
city, that it was impossible to set any 
public charity on foot unless through a 
tavern dinner. I do not think our metro- 
politan charities would plead the same 
necessity ; but to a club met for conver- 
sation a supper is a good basis, as it dis- 
arms all parties, and puts pedantry and 
business to the door. All are in good 
humour and at leisure, which are the first 
conditions of discourse ; the ordinary 
reserves are thrown off, experienced men 
meet with the freedom of boys, and, 
sooner or later, impart all that is singular 
in their experience. 

The hospitalities of clubs are easily 
exaggerated. No doubt the suppers of 
wits and philosphers acquire much lustre 
by time and renown. Plutarch, Xenophon 
and Plato, who have celebrated each a 
banquet of their set, have given us next 
to no data of the viands ; and it is to be 
believed that an indifferent tavern dinner 
in such society was more relished by the 
convives than a much better one in w^orsa 
company. Herrick’s verses to Ben Jon- 
son no doubt paint the fact : — 

When we such clusters had 

As made us nobly wild, not mad ; 

And yet, each verse of thine 

Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.” 

Such friends make the feast satisfying J 
and I notice that it was when things went 
prosperously, and the company was full 
of honour, at the banquet of the Cid, that 
“ the guests all were joyful, and agreed in 
one thing — that they had not eaten better 
for three years.” 

I need only hint the value of the club 
for bringing masters in their several arts 
to compare and expand their views, to 
come to an understanding on these points, 
and so that their united opinion shall 
have its just influence on public questions 
of education and politics. ’Tis agreed 
that in the sections of the British Asso- 
ciation more information is mutually and 
effectually communicated, in a few hours, 
than in many months of ordinary corre- 
spondence, and the printing and trans- 
mission of ponderous reports# We know 



COURAGE, 463 


that Vhomm de lettres iit a little wary, 
and not fond of giving away his seedcorn ; 
but there is an infallible way to draw him 
out, namely, by having as good as he. If 
you have Tuscaroora and he Canada, he 
may exchange kernel for kernel. If his 
discretion is incurable, and he dare not 
speak of fairy gold, he will yet tell what 
new books he has found, what old ones 
recovered, what men write and read 
abroad. A principal purpose also is the 
hospitality of the club, as a means of 
receiving a worthy foreigner with mutual 
advantage. 

Every man brings into society some 
partial thought and local culture. We 
need range and alternation of topics, and 
variety of minds. One likes ;in a com- 
panion a phlegm which it is a triumph to 
disturb, and, not less, to make in an old 
acquaintance unexpected discoveries of 


scope and power through the advantage 
of an inspiring subject. Wisdom is like 
electricity. There is no permanently 
wise man, but men capable of wisdom 
who, being put into certain company, of 
other favourabl® conditions, become wise 
for a short time, as glasses rubbed ac- 
quire electric power for a while. But, 
while we look complacently at these 
obvious pleasures and values of good 
companions, I do not forget that Nature 
is always very much in earnest, and lhat 
her great gifts have something serious 
and stern. When we look for the highest 
benefits of conversation, the Spartan rule 
of one to one is usually enforced. Dis- 
course, when it rises highest and searches 
deepest, when it lifts us into that mood 
out of which thoughts come that remain 
as stars in our firmament, is between 
two. 


COURAGE. 


I OBSERVE that there are three qualities 
which conspicuously attract the wonder 
and reverence of mankind : — 

1. Disinterestedness, as shown in indif- 
ference to the ordinary bribes and influ- 
ences of conduct — a purpose so sincere 
and generous that it cannot be tempted 
aside by any prospects of wealth or other 
private advantage. Self-love is, in almost 
all men, such an over-weight, that they 
aie incredulous of a man’s habitual pre- 
ference of the general good to his own ; 
but when they see it proved by sacrifices 
of ease, wealth, rank, and of life itself, 
there is no limit to their admiration. 
This has made the power of the saints of 
the East and West, who have led the 
religion of great nations. Self-sacrifice 
is the real miracle out of which all the 
reported miracles grew. This makes the 
renown of the heroes of Greece and Rome 
— of Socrates, Aristides, and Phocion ; of 
Quintus Curtins, Cato, and Regulus: of 
Hatem Tai’s hospitality ; of Chatham, 
whose scornful magnanimity gave him im- 
mense popularity ; of Washington, giving 
his service to the public without salary or 
reward. 

2. Practical power. Men admire the 
man who can organize their wishes and 
thoughts in stone and wood and steel and 
brass — the man who can build the boat, 
who has the impiety to make the rivers 
run the way he wants them, who can lead 
bis telegraph thrQugh the ocean from shore 


to shore ; who, sitting in his closet, can lay 
out the plans of a campaign — sea-war and 
land war ; such that the best generals and 
admirals, when all is done, see that they 
must thank him for success ; the power of 
better combination and foresight, how- 
ever exhibited, which, whether it only 
plays a game of chess, or whether, more 
loftily, a cunning mathematician, pene- 
trating the cubic weights of stars, predicts 
the planet which eyes had never seen ; or 
whether, exploring the chemical elements 
whereof we and the world are made, and 
seeing their secret, Franklin draws off the 
lightning in his hand, suggesting that one 
day a wiser geology shall make the earth- 
quake harmless and the volcano an agri- 
cultural resource. Or here is one who, 
seeing the wishes of men, knows how to 
come at their end ; whispers to this friend, 
argues down that adversary, moulds society 
to his purpose, and looks at all men as 
wax for his hands — takes command of 
them as the wind does of clouds, as the 
mother does of the child, or the man that 
knows more does of the man that knows 
less ; and leads them in glad surprise to 
the very point where they would be : this 
man is followed with acclamation. 

3. The third excellence is courage, the 
perfect will, which no terrors can shake, 
which is attracted by frowns or threats 
or hostile armies, nay, needs these to 
awaken and fan its reserved energies into 
A pur9 flame, and is never quite itsetf 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


464 

until the hazard ie eictreme ; then it is 
serene and fertile, and all its powers play 
well. There is a Hercules, an Achilles, 
a Rustem, an Arthur, or a Cid in the 
mythology of every nation ; and in authen- 
tic history, a Leonidas, a Scipio, a Caesar, 
a Richard Coeur de Lion, a Cromwell, a 
Nelson, a Great Cond6, a Bertrand du 
Guesclin, a Doge Dandolo, a Napoleon, a 
Massena, a Ney. ’Tis said courage is 
common, but the immense esteem in 
which it is held proves it to be rare. 
Animal resistance, the instinct of the male 
animal when cornered, is no doubt com- 
mon ; but the pure article, courage with 
eyes, courage with conduct, self-posses- 
sion at the cannon’s mouth, cheerfulness 
in lonely adherence to the right, is the 
endowment of elevated characters. I need 
not show how much it is esteemed, for the 
people give it the first rank. They forgive 
everything to it. What an ado we make 
through two thousand years about Ther- 
mopylae and Salamisl What a memory 
of Poitiers and Crecy, and Bunker Hill, 
and Washington’s endurance ! And any 
man who puts his life in peril in a cause 
which is esteemed becomes the darling of 
all men. The very nursery-books, the 
ballads which delight boys, the romances 
which delight men, the favourite topics of 
eloquence, the thunderous emphasis which 
orators give to every martial defiance and 
passage of arms, and which the people 
greet, may testify. How short a time since 
this whole nation rose every morning to 
read or to hear the traits of courage of its 
sons and brothers in the field, and was 
never weary of the theme ! We have had 
examples of men who, for showing effective 
courage on a single occasion, have become 
a favourite spectacle to nations, and must 
be brought in chariots to every mass 
meeting. 

Men are so charmed with valour, that 
they have pleased themselves with being 
called lions, leopards, eagles, and dragons, 
from the animals contemporary with us 
in the geologic formations. But the ani- 
mals have great advantage of us in pre- 
cocity. Touch the snapping-turtle with 
a stick, and he seizes it with his teeth. 
Cut off his head, and the teeth will not let 
go the stick. Break the egg of the young, 
and the little embryo, before yet the eyes 
are open, bites fiercely; these vivacious 
creatures contriving — shall we say ? — not 
only to bite after they are dead, but also to 
bite before they are bom. 

But man begins life helpless. The babe 
If in paroxysms of fear the moment its 


nurse leaves it alone, and it comes so 
slowly to any power of self-protection, 
that mothers say the salvation of the life 
and health of a young child is a perpetual 
miracle. The terrors of the child are 
quite reasonable, and add to his loveli- 
ness ; for his utter ignorance and weak- 
ness, and his encharting indignation on 
such a small basis of capiul, compel 
every by-stander to take his part. Every 
moment, as long as he is awake, he 
studies the use of his eyes, ears, hands, 
and feet, learning how to meet and avoid 
his dangers, and thus every hour loses one 
terror more. But this education stops too 
soon. A large majority of men being bred 
in families, and beginning early to be 
occupied day by day with some routine 
of safe industry, never come to the rough 
experiences that make the Indian, the 
soldier, or the frontiersman self-subsistent 
and fearless. Hence the high price of 
courage indicates the general timidity. 
* Mankind,” said Franklin, “ are dastardly 
when they meet with opposition.” In war, 
even, generals are seldom found eager to 
give battle. Lord Wellington said, “Uni- 
forms were often, masks”; and again, 
“ When my journal appears, many statues 
must come down.” The Norse Sagas 
relate that when Bishop Magne reproved 
King Sigurd for his wicked divorce, tho 
priest who attended the bishop, expecting 
every moment when the savage king would 
burst wdth rage and slay his superior, 
said, “ that he saw the sky no bigger than 
a calf-skin.” And I remember when a 
pair of Irish girls, who had been runaway 
with in a wagon by a skittish horse, said 
that, when he began to rear, they were so 
frightened tliat they could not see tho 
horse. 

Cowardice shuts the eyes till the sky is 
not larger than a calf-skin ; shuts the eyes 
so that we cannot see the horse that is 
running away with us; worse, shuts lha 
eyes of the mind and chills the heart. 
Fear is cruel and mean. The political 
reigns of terror have been reigns of mad- 
ness and malignity — a total perversion of 
opinion ; society is upside down, and its 
best men are thought too bad to live, 
Then the protection which a house, a 
family, neighbourhood and property, even 
the first accumulation of savings, gives, 
go in all times to generate this taint of the 
respectable classes. Voltaire said, “ One 
of the chief misfortunes of honest people 
is that they are cowardly.” Those political 
parties which gather in the well-disposed 
portion of the community— how mfrnn 



COURAGE. 


tnd ignoble I what white lips they hs^^e ! 
always on the defensive, as if the lead 
were intrusted to the journals, often 
written in great part by women and boys, 
who, without strength, wish to keep up 
the appearance of strength. They can do 
the hurras, the placarding, the flags — and 
the voting, if it is a fair day ; but the 
aggressive attitude of men who will have 
right done, will no longer be bothered 
with burglars and ruffians in the streets, 
counterfeiters in public offices, and thieves 
on the bench ; that part, the part of the 
leader and soul of the vigilance committee, 
must be taken by stout and sincere men 
wlx) are really angry and determined. In 
ordinary, wo have a snappish criticism 
which watches and contradicts the oppo- 
site party. We want the will which 
advances and dictates. When we get an 
advantage, as in Congress the other day, 
it is because our adversary has committed 
a fault, not that we have taken the initia- 
tive and given the law. Nature has made 
up her mind that what cannot defend itself 
shall not be defended. Complaining never 
30 loud, and with never so much reason, 
is of no use. One heard much cant of 
peace-parties long ago in Kansas and 
elsewhere, that their strength lay in the 
greatness of their wrongs, and dissuading 
all resistance, as if to make this strength 
greater. But were their wrongs greater 
than the negro's ? and what kind of 
strength did they ever give him ? It was 
always invitation to the tyrant, and bred 
disgust in those who would protect the 
victim. What cannot stand must fall ; 
and the measure of our sincerity, and 
therefore of the respect of men, is the 
amount of health and wealth we will 
hazard in the defence of our right. An 
old farmer, my neighbour across the 
fence, when I ask him if he is not going 
to town-meeting, says : “ No; 'tis no use 
balloting, for it will not stay ; but what 
you do with the gun will stay so.” Nature 
has charged every one with his own de- 
fence as with his own support, and the 
only title I can have to your help is when 
I have manfully put forth all the means I 
ossess to keep me, and, being overborne 
y odds, the by-standers have a natural 
wish to interfere and see fair play. 

But with this pacific education, we have 
no readiness for bad times. I am much 
mistaken if every man who went to the 
army in the late war had not a lively 
curiosity to know how he should behave 
in action. Tender, amiable boys, who 
had never encountered any rougher play 


465 

than a base-ball match or a fishing excur- 
sion, were suddenly drawn up to face a 
bayonet charge or capture a battery. Of 
course, they must each go into that action 
with a certain despair. Each whispers to 
himself: ” My exertions must be of small 
account to the result ; only will the 
benignant Heaven save me from disgracing 
myself and my friends and my State, 
Die ! Oh yes, I can well die ; but I can- 
not afford to misbehave; and I do not 
know how I shall feel.” So groat a soldier 
as the old French Marshal Montluc 
acknowledges that he has often trembled 
with fear, and recovered courage when he 
had said a prayer for the occasion. I 
knew a young soldier who died in the 
early campaign, who confided to his sister 
that he had made up his mind to volunteer 
for the war. “ I have not,” he said, ” any 
proper courage, but I shall never let any- 
one find it out.** And he had accustomed 
I himself always to go into whatever place 
of danger, and do whatever he was afraid 
to do, setting a dogged resolution to resist 
this natural infirmity. Coleridge has 
preserved an anecdote of an officer in the 
British Navy, who told him that when 
he, in his first boat expedition, a midship- 
man in his fourteenth year, accompanied 
Sir Alexander Ball, ” as we were rowing 
up to the vessel we were to attack, amid a 
discharge of musketry, I was overpowered 
1 with fear, my knees shook, and I was 
ready to faint away. Lieutenant Ball 
seeing me, placed himself close beside 
me, took hold of my hand and whispered, 
* Courage, my dear boy ! you will recover 
in a minute or so ; I was just the same 
when I first went out in this way.’ It was 
as if an angel spoke to me. From that 
moment I was as fearless and as forward 
as the oldest of the boat’s crew. But I 
dare not think what would have become 
of me, if, at that moment, he had scoffed 
and exposed me.” 

Knowledge is the antidote to fear — > 
Knowledge, Use, and Reason, with its 
higher aids. The child is as much in 
danger from a staircase, or the fire-grate, 
or a bath-tub, or a cat, as the soldier from 
a cannon or an ambush. Each surmounts 
the fear as fast as he precisely understands 
the peril, and learns the means of resist- 
ance. Each is liable to panic, which is, 
exactly, the terror of ignorance surren- 
dered to the imagination. Knowledge is 
the encourager, knowledge that takes fear 
out of the heart, knowledge and use. 
which is knowledge in practice. They 
can conquer who believe they can, It is 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


46* 

he who has done the deed once who docs 
not shrink from attempting it again. It 
is the groom who knows the jumping 
horse well who can safely ride him. It is 
the veteran soldier who, seeing the flash 
of the cannon, can step aside from the 
path of the ball. Use makes a better 
soldier than the most urgent considera- 
tions of duty — familiarity with danger 
enabling him to estimate the danger. He 
sees how much is the risk, and is not 
afflicted with imagination ; knows practi- 
cally Marshal Saxe’s rule, that every 
soldier killed costs the enemy his weight 
in lead. 

The sailor loses fear as fast as he 
acquires command of sails and spars and 
steam ; the frontiersman, w’hen he has a 
perfect rifle and has acquired a sure aim. j 
To the sailor’s experience every new cir- j 
cumstance suggests what he must do. 
The terrific chances which make the 
hours and the minutes long to the pas- 
senger, he whiles away by incessant 
application of expedients and repairs. 
To him a leak, a hurricane, or a water- 
spout, is so much work — no more. The 
hunter is not alarmed by bears, cata- 
mounts, or wolves, nor the grazier by his 
bull, nor the dog-breeder by his blood- 
hound, nor an Arab by the simoom, nor a 
farmer by a fire in the woods. The forest 
on fire looks discouraging enough to a 
citizen ; the farmer is skilful to fight it. 
The neighbours run together; with pine 
boughs they can mop out the flame, and, 
by raking with the hoe a long but little 
trench, confine to a patch the fire which 
would easily spread over a hundred acres. 

In short, courage consists in equality 
to the problem before us. The schoolboy 
is daunted before his tutor by a question 
of arithmetic, because he does not yet 
command the simple steps of the solution 
which the boy beside him has mastered. 
These once seen, he is as cool as Ar- 
chimedes, and cheerily proceeds a step 
farther. Courage is equality to the problem, 
in affairs, in science, in trade, in council, 
or in action ; consists in the conviction 
that the agents with whom you contend 
are not superior in strength or resources 
or spirit to you. The general must stimu- 
late the mind of his soldiers to the per- 
ception that they are men, and the enemy 
is no more. Knowledge, yes; for the 
danger of dangers is illusion. The eye is 
easily daunted; and the drums, flags, 
shining helmets, beard, and moustache of 
the soldier have conquered you long before 
bis gword or bayonet reaches you 


But we do not exhaust the subject i& 
the slight analysis; we must not forget 
the variety of temperaments, each of which 
qualifies this power of resistance. It is 
observed that men with little imagination 
are less fearful ; they wait till they feel 
pain, whilst others of more sensibility anti- 
cipate it, and suffer in the fear of th^ 
pang more acutely than in the pang. ’Tis 
certain that the threat is sometimes more 
formidable than the stroke, and 'tis pos- 
sible that the beholders suffer more keenly 
than the victims. Bodily pain is super- 
ficial, seated usually in the skin and 
the extremities, for the sake of giving us 
warning to put us on our guard ; not in 
the vitals, where the rupture that produces 
death is perhaps not felt, arid the victim 
never knew what hurt him. Pain is super- 
ficial, and therefore fear is. The torments 
of martyrdoms are probably most keenly 
felt by the bystanders. The torments 
are illusory. The first suffering is the 
last suffering, the later hurts being lost 
on insensibility. Our affections and 
wishes for the external welfare of the 
hero tumultuously rush to expression in 
tears and outcries: but we, like him, 
subside into indifference and defiance, 
when we perceive how short is the longest 
arm of malice, how serene is the sufferer. 
It is plain that there is no separata 
essence called courage, no cup or cell in 
the brain, no vessel in the heart contain- 
ing drops or atoms that make or give this 
virtue ; but it is the right or healthy state 
of every man, when he is free to do that 
which is constitutional to him to do. It 
is directness — the instant performing of 
that which he ought. The thoughtful 
man says, you differ from me in opinion 
and methods ; but do you not see that I 
cannot think or act otherwise than I do ? 
that my way of living is organic ? And to 
be really strong we must adhere to our 
own means. On organic action all strength 
depends. Hear what women say of doing 
a task by sheer force of will ; it costs 
them a fit of sickness. Plutarch relates 
that the Pythoness who tried to prophesy 
without command in the Temple at Delphi, 
though she performed the usual rites, and 
inhaled the air of the cavern standing on 
the tripod, fell into convulsions, and died. 
Undoubtedly there is a temperamental 
courage, a warlike blood, which loves a 
fight, does not feel itself except in a 
quarrel, as one sees in wasps, or ants, or 
cocks, or cats. The like vein appears in 
certain races of men and in individuals of 
every race, lo every school there art 



COURAGE. 


467 


certain fighting boys; in every society, 
the contradicting men ; in every town, bra- 
voes and bullies, better or worse dressed, 
fancy-men, patrons of the cock-pit and 
the ring. Courage is temperamental, 
scientific, ideal. Swedenborg has left this 
record of his king : “ Charles XII. of 
Sweden did not know what that was which 
others called fear, nor what that spurious 
valour and daring that is excited by 
inebriating draughts, for he never tasted 
any liquid but pure water. Of him we 
may say, that he led a life more remote 
from death, and in fact lived more, than 
any other man.” It was told of the Prince 
of Cond6, “ that there not being a more 
furious man in the world, danger in fight 
never disturbs him more than just to make 
him civil, and to command in words of 
great obligation to his officers and men, 
and without any the least disturbance to 
his judgment or spirit.” Each has his 
own courage, as his own talent ; but the 
courage of the tiger is one, and of the 
horse another. The dog that scorns to 
fight, will fight for his master. The llama 
that will carry a load if you caress him, 
will refuse food and die if he is scourged. 
The fury of onset is one, and of calm 
endurance another. There is a courage 
of the cabinet as well as a courage of the 
field ; a courage of manners in private 
assemblies, and another in public assem- 
blies ? a courage which enables one man 
to speak masterly to a hostile company, 
whilst another man who can easily face a 
cannon’s mouth dares not open his own. 

There is a courage of a merchant in 
dealing with his trade, by which dangerous 
turns of affairs are met and prevailed 
over. Merchants recognize as much gal- 
lantry, well-judged too, in the conduct of 
a wise and upright man of business, in 
difficult times, as soldiers in a soldier. 

There is a courage in the treatment of 
every art by a master in architecture, in 
sculpture, in painting, or in poetry, each 
cheering the mind of the spectator or 
receiver as by true strokes of genius, 
which yet nowise implies the presence of 
physical valour in the artist. This is the 
courage of genius, in every kind. A cer- 
tain quantity of power belongs to a certain 
quantity of faculty. The beautiful voice 
at church goes sounding on, and covers 
up in its volume, as in a cloak, all the 
defects of the choir. The singers, I 
observe, all yield to it, and so the fair 
ginger indulges her instinct, and dares, 
tmd dares, because she knows she can. 

It giv9S the cuttilig edge ^ every pro- 


fession. The judge puts his mind to the 
tangle of contradictions in the case, 
squarely accosts the question, and, by not 
being afraid of it, by dealing with it as 
business which must be disposed of, he 
sees presently that common arithmetic 
and common methods apply to this affair. 
Perseverance strips it of all peculiarity, 
and ranges it on the same ground as other 
business. Morphy played a daring game 
in chess : the daring was only an illusion 
of the spectator, for the player sees his 
move to be well fortified and safe. You 
may see the same dealing in criticism; a 
new book astonishes for a few days, takes 
itself out of common jurisdiction, and no- 
body knows what to say of it : but the 
scholar is not deceived. The old prin- 
ciples which books exist to express are 
more beautiful than any book ; and out of 
love of the reality he is an expert judge 
how far the book has approached it and 
where it has come short. In all appli- 
cations ’tis the same power — the habit of 
reference to one’s own mind, as the home 
of all truth and counsel, and which can 
easily dispose of any book because it can 
very well do without all books. When a 
confident man comes into a company 
magnifying this or that author he has 
freshly read, the company grow silent and 
ashamed of their ignorance. But I re- 
member the old professor, whoso search- 
ing mind engraved every word he spoke on 
the memory of the class, when we asked 
if he had read this or that shining novelty, 
“No, I have never read that book;” in- 
stantly the book lost credit, and was not 
to be heard of again. 

Every creature has a courage of his 
constitution fit for his duties; — Archi- 
medes, the courage of a geometer to stick 
to his diagram, heedless of the siege and 
sack of the city ; and the Roman soldier 
his faculty to strike at Archimedes. Each 
is strong, relying on his own, and each is 
betrayed when he seeks in himself the 
courage of others. 

Captain John Brown, the hero of Kansas, 
said to me in conversation, that “ for a 
settler in a new country, one good, be- 
lieving, strong-minded man is worth a 
hundred, nay, a thousand men without 
character; and that the right men will 
give a permanent direction to the fortunes 
of a state. As for the bullying drunkards, 
of which armies are usually made up, ha 
thought cholera, small-pox, and consump- 
tion as valuable recruits.” He held the 
belief that courage and chastity are silent 
ponceming tltem^plve?. Ho said, **A3 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE, 


468 

soon as I hear one of my men say, ‘ Ah, 
let me only get my eye on such a man 
I’ll bring him down,' I don’t expect much 
aid in the fight from that talker. 'Tis the 
quiet, peaceable men, the men of prin- 
ciple, that make the best soldiers.” 

’Ti? still observed those men most valiant are 

Who are most modest ere they came to war.** 

True courage is not ostentatious ; men 
who wish to inspire terror seem thereby 
to confess themselves cowards. Why do 
they rely on it, but because they know how 
potent it is with themselves ? 

The true temper has genial influences. 
It makes a bond of union between ene- 
mies. Governor Wise, of Virginia, in the 
record of his first interviews with his 
prisoner, appeared to great advantage. If 
Governor Wise is a superior man, or in- 
asmuch as he is a superior man, he dis- 
tinguishes John Brown. As they confer, 
they understand each other swiftly ; each 
respects the other. If opportunity allowed, 
they would prefer each other’s society and 
desert their former companions. Enemies 
would become affectionate. Hector and 
Achilles, Richard and Saladin, Wellington 
and Soult, General Daumas and Abdel 
Kader, become aware that they are nearer 
and more alike than any other two, and, if 
their nation and circumstance did not 
keep them apart, would run into each 
other’s arms. 

See, too, what good contagion belongs to 
it. Everywhere it finds its own with mag- 
netic affinity. Courage of the soldier 
a^kes the courage of woman, Florence 
Nightingale brings lint and the blessing of 
her shadow. Heroic women offer them- 
selves as nurses of the brave veteran. 
The troop of Virginian infantry that had 
marched to guard the prison of John 
Brown ask leave to pay their respects to 
the prisoner. Poetry and eloquence catch 
the hint, and soar to a pitch unknown 
before. Everything feels the new breath, 
except the old doting, nigh-dead poli- 
ticians, whose heart the trumpet of resur- 
rection could not wake. 

The charm of the best courages is that 
they are inventions, inspirations, flashes 
of genius. The hero could not have done 
the feat at another hour, in a lower mood. 
The best act of the marvellous genius of 
Greece was its first act ; not in the statue 
or the Parthenon, but in the instinct, 
which, at Thermopylae, held Asia at bay, 
kept Asia out of Europe — Asia with its 
antiquities and organic slavery — from cor- 
rupting the hope and the new morning of 


j the West. The statue, cho’ architecturtj 
I were the later and inferior creation of the 
same genius. In view of this moment of 
history, we recognize a certain prophetic 
instinct better than wisdom. Napoleon 
said well, ” My hand is immediately oon- 
nected with my head ; ” but the sacred 
courage is connected with the heart. The 
head is a half, a fraction, until it is en- 
larged and inspired by the moral senti- 
ment. For it is not the means on which 
we draw, as health or wealth, practical 
skill or dexterous talent, or multitudes of 
followers, that count, but the aims only. 
The aim reacts back on the means. A 
great aim aggrandizes the means. The 
meal and water that are the commissariat 
of the forlorn hope that stake their lives 
to defend the pass are sacred as the Holy 
Grail, or as if one had eyes to see in 
chemistry the fuel that is rushing to feed 
the sun. 

There is a persuasion in the soul of 
man that he is here for cause, that he was 
put down in this place by the Creator to 
do the work for which he inspires him, 
that thus he is an overmatch for all an- 
tagonists that could combine against him. 
The pious Mrs. Hutchinson says of some 
passages in the defence of Nottingham 
against the Cavaliers, ” It was a great 
instruction that the best and highest 
courages are beams of the Almighty.’* 
And whenever the religious sentiment is 
adequately affirmed, it must be with 
dazzling courage. As long as it is cowardly 
insinuated, as with the wish to fsuccour 
some partial and temporary interest, or 
to make it affirm some pragmatical tenet 
which our parish church receives to-day, 
it is not imparted, and cannot inspire or 
create. For it is always new, leads and 
suprises, and practice never comes up 
with it. There are ever appearing in the 
world men who, almost as soon as they 
are born, take a bee-line to the rack of 
the inquisitor, the axe of the tyrant, like 
Jordano Bruno, Vanini, Huss, Paul, Jesus, 
and Socrates. Look at Foxe’s Lives of 
the Martyrs, Sewel’s History of the 
Quakers, Southey’s Book of the Church, 
at the folios of the Brothers Bollandi, who 
collected the lives of twenty-five thousand 
martyrs, confessors, ascetics, and self- 
tormentors. There is much of fable, but 
a broad basis of fact. The tender skin 
does not shrink from bayonets, the timid 
woman is not scared by fagots ; the nack 
is not frightful, nor the rope ignominious. 
The poor Puritan, Antony Parsons, at the 
stake; tied straw on his head, when the 



COURAGE. 


'Are approached hini; and said, “This is 
God’s hat.” Sacred courage indicates 
that a man loves an idea better than all 
things in the world ; that he is aiming 
neither at pelf nor comfort, but will ven- 
ture all to put in act the invisible thought 
in his mind. He is everywhere a libera- 
tor, but of a freedom that is ideal ; not 
seeking to have land or money or con- 
veniences, but to have no other limitation 
than that which his own constitution im- 
poses. He is free to speak truth ; he is 
not free to lie. He wishes to break every 
yoke all over the world which hinders his 
brother from acting after his thought. 

There are degrees of courage, and each 
step upward makes us acquainted with a 
higher virtue. Let us say then frankly 
that the education of the will is the object 
of our existence. Poverty, the prison, the 
rack, the fire, the hatred and execrations 
of our fellow-men, appear trials beyond 
the endurance of common humanity ; but 
to the hero whose intellect is aggrandized 
by the soul, and so measures these penal- 
ties against the good which his thought 
surveys, these terrors vanish as darkness 
at sunrise. 

We have little right in piping times of 
peace to pronounce on these rare heights 
of character ; but there is no assurance 
of security. In the most private life, 
difficult duty is never far off. Therefore 
we must think with courage. Scholars 
and thinkers are prone to an effeminate 
habit, and shriqk if a coarser shout comes 
up from the street, or a brutal act is re- 
corded in the journals. The Medical 
College piles up in its museum its grim 
monsters of morbid anatomy, and there 
are melancholy sceptics with a taste for 
carrion who batten on the hideous facts 
in history — persecutions, inquisitions, St. 
Bartholomew massacres, devilish lives, 
Nero, Caesar, Borgia, Marat, Lopez — men 
in whom every ray of humanity was ex- 
tinguished, parricides, matricides, and 
whatever moral monsters. These are not 
cheerful facts, but they do not disturb a 
healthy mind ; they require of us a 
patience as robust as the energy that 
attacks us, and an unresting exploration 
of final causes. Wolf, snake, and croco- 
dile are not inharmonious in nature, but 
are made useful as checks, scavengers, 
and pioneers ; and we must have a scope 
as large as Nature’s to deal with beast- 
like men, detect what scullion function is 
assigned thorn, and foresee in the secular 
melioration of the planet how these will 
become unnecessary, and will die out. 


4O9 

He has not learned the lesson of life 
who does not every day surmount a fear. 
I do not wish to put my 5 elf or any man 
into a theatrical positioni or urge him to 
ape the courage of his comrade. Hava 
the courage not to adopt another’s cour- 
age. There is scope and cause and re- 
sistance enough for us in our proper work 
and circumstance. And there is no creed 
of an honest man, be he Christian, Turk, 
or Gentoo, which does not equally preach 
it. If you have no faith in beneficient 
power above you, but see only an ada- 
mantine fate coiling its folds above nature 
and man, then reflect that the best use of 
fate is to teach us courage, if only because 
baseness cannot change the appointed 
event. If you accept your thoughts as 
inspirations from the Supreme Intelli 
gence, obey them when they prescribe 
difficult duties, because they come only 
so long as they are used ; or, if your 
scepticism reaches to the last verge, and 
you have no confidence in any foreign 
mind, then be brave, because there is one 
good opinion which must always be 
of consequence to you, namely your 
own. 

I am permitted to enrich my chapter 
by adding an anecdote of pure courage 
from real life, as narrated in a ballad by a 
lady to whom all the particulars of thg 
fact are exactly known. 

GEORGE NIDIVER, 

Men have done brave deeds, 

And bards have sung them well : 

1 of good George Nidiver 
Now the tale will tell. 

In Californian mountains 
A hunter bold was he ; 

Keen his eye and sure his aim 
As any you should see, 

A little Indian boy 
Followed him everywhere, 

Eager to shar e the hunter’s joy 
The hunter’s meal to share. 

And when the bird or deer 
Fell by the hunter's skill, 

The boy was always near 
To help with right good-wfll, 

One day as through the cleft 
Between two mountains steeps 

Shut in both right and left. 

Their questing way they keep. 

They see two grizzly bears 
With hunger fierce aud fell 

Rush at them unawares 
Right down the nairtow dell. 

The boy turned round with screams, 

And ran with terror wild ; 

One of the pair of savage beasts 
Pursued the shrieking child. 



470 


SOCIETY A MD solitude. 


The hunter raised his gun — 

He knew one charge was all — 

And through the boy’s pursuing foe 
He sent his only ball. 

The other on George Nidiver 
Came on with dreadful pace : 

The hunter stood unarmed, 

And met him face to face. 

I say unarmed he stood. 

Against those frightful paws 

The rifle butt, or club of wood, 
Could stand no more than straws. 

George Nidiver stood still 
And looked him in the face; 

The wild beast stopped amazed, 
Then came with slackening pace. 


I Still firm the hunter stood, ^ 

Although his heart beat high^ 

Again the creature stopped, 

And gazed with wondering eya 

The> hunter met his gaze, 

Nor .yet an inch gave way ; 

The bea-.f turned slowly round. 

And slovrriy moved away 

What thought were in hi! nind 
It would be havrd to spell : 

What thoughts wetre in George Nfdiver 
I rather guess thari^ tell. 

Be sure that rifle’s aim^' 

Swift choice of generous ^narti 
Showed in its passing gleam 
The depth of a bravo heart. 


SUCCESS. 


Our American people cannot be taxed 
with slowness in performance or in 
praising their performance. The earth is 
shaken by our engineries. We are feel- 
ing our youth and nerve and bone. We 
have the power of territory and of sea- 
coast, and know the use of these. We 
count our census, we read our growing 
valuations, we survey our map, which 
becomes old in a year or two. Our eyes 
run Approvingly along the lengthened 
lines of railroad and telegraph. We have 
gone nearest to the Pole. We have dis- 
covered the Antarctic continent. We in- 
terfere in Central and South America, at 
Canton, and in Japan; we are adding to 
an already enormous territory. Our politi- 
cal constitution is the hope of the world, 
and we value ourselves on all these feats. 

’Tis the way of the world ; ’tis the lav/ 
of youth, and of unfolding strength. Men 
are made each with some triumphant 
superiority, which, through some adapta- 
tion of fingers, or ear, or eye, or ciphering, 
or pugilistic or musical or literary craft, 
enriches the community with a new art ; 
and not only we, but all men of European 
stock value these certificates. Giotto 
could draw a perfect circle ; Erwin of 
Steinbach could build a minster; Olaf, 
king of Norway, could run round his galley 
on the blades of the oars of the rowers, 
when the ship was in motion; Ojeda 
could run out swiftly on a plank projecting 
from the top of a tower, turn round swiftly 
and come back ; Evelyn writes from 
Rome; " Bernini, the Florentine sculptor, 
architect, painter, and poet, a little before 
my coming to Rome, gave a public opera, 
wherein he painted the scenes, cut the 
Statues, invented the eo^u^es, composed 


the music, writ the comedy, and built the 
theatre.” 

” There is nothing m war,” said Napo- 
leon, “ which I cannot do by my own 
hands. If there is nobody to make gun- 
powder, I can manufacture it. The gun- 
carriages I know how to construct. If it 
is necessary to make cannons at the forge, 
I can make them. 1 he details of work- 
ing them in battle, if it is necessary to 
teach, I shall teach them. In administra- 
tion, it is I alone who have arranged the 
finances, as you know.” 

It is recorded of Linnaeus, among many 
proofs of his beneficent skill, that when 
the timber in the ship-yards of Sweden 
was ruined by rot, Linnaeus, was desired 
by the government to find a remedy. He 
studied the insects that infested the 
timber, and found that they laid their 
eggs in the logs within certain days in 
April, and he directed that during ten 
days at that season the logs should be 
immersed under water in the docks ; 
which being done the timber was found to 
be uninjured. 

Columbus at Veragua found plenty of 
gold ; but leaving the coast, the ship full 
of one hundred and fifty skilful seamen - 
some of them old pilots, and with loo 
much experience of their craft and 
treachery to him— the wise admiral kept 
his private record of his homeward path. 
And when he reached Spain, he told the 
King and Queen, ” that they may ask all 
the pilots who came with him, where is 
Veragua. Let them answer aud say, if 
they know where Veragua lies. I assert 
that they can give no other account than 
that they went to lands where there was 
abundance of ^old, but (boy ^9 QOt Iwiow 



SUCCESS. 


the way to return thither, but would be 
©Diiged to go on a voyage of discovery as 
much as if they had never been there 
before. There is a mode of reckoning,” 
he proudly adds, “ derived from astro- 
nomy, which is sure and safe to any who 
understands it.” 

Hippocrates in Greece knew how to 
stay the devouring plague which ravaged 
Athens in his time, and his skill died with 
him. Dr. Benjamin Rush, in Philadel- 
phia, carried that city heroically through 
the yellow fever of the year 1793. Lever- 
rier carries the Copernican system in his 
head, and knew where to look for the new 
planet. We have seen an American 
woman write a novel of which a million 
copies were sold in all languages, and 
which had one merit, of speaking to the 
universal heart, and was read with equal 
interest to three audiences, namely, in the 
parlour, in the kitchen, and in the nursery 
of every house. We have seen women 
who could institute hospitals and schools 
in armies. We have seen a woman who 
by pure song could melt the souls of 
whole populations. And there is no 
limit to these varieties of talent. 

These are arts to be thankful for — each 
one as it is a new direction of human 
power. We cannot choose but respect 
them. Our civilization is made up of a 
million contributions of this kind. For 
success, to be sure, we esteem it a test in 
other people, since we do first in our- 
selves. We respect ourselves more if we 
have succeeded. Neither do we grudge 
to each of these benefactors the praise or 
tlie profit which accrues from his in- 
dustry. 

Here are already quite different degrees 
of moral merit in these examples. I 
don’t know but we and our race elsewhere 
set a higher value on wealth, victory, and 
coarse superiority of all kinds, than other 
men — have less tranquillity of mind, are 
less easily contented. The Saxon is 
taught from his infancy to wish to be 
first. The Norseman was a restless 
rider, fighter, freebooter. The ancient 
Norse ballads describe him as afflicted 
with this inextinguishable thirst of victory. 
The mother says to her son : — 

•* Success shall be in thy courser tall. 

Success in thyself, which is best of all. 
Success in thy hand, success in thy foot, 

In struggle with man, in battle with brute : — 
The holy God and Saint Drothin dear 
Shall never shut eyes on thy career ; 

Look out, look out, Svend Vouved 1 " 

Tbese feats tbat we extel do not signify 


47 * 

SO much as we say. These boasted arts 
are of very recent origin. They are local 
conveniences, but do not really add to oui 
stature. The greatest men of tiie world 
have managed not to want them. Newton 
was a great man, without telegraph, or 
gas, or steam-coach, or rubber shoes, or 
lucifer-matches, or ether for liis pain ; so 
was Shakespeare, and Alfred and Scipio, 
and Socrates. These ar« iocal con- 
veniences, but how easy to go now to 
parts of the world where not only all these 
arts are wanting, but where they are 
despised. The Arabian sheiks, the most 
dignified people in the planet, do not 
want them ; yet have as much self-respect 
as the English, and are easily able to 
impress the Frenchman or the American 
who visits them with the respect due to a 
brave and sufficient man. 

These feats have, to be sure, great 
difference of merit, and some of them in- 
volve power of a high kind. But the 
public values the invention more than 
the inventor does. The inventor knows 
there is much more and better where this 
came from. The public sees in it a lucra- 
tive secret. Men see the reward which 
the inventor enjoys, and they think, 
” How shall we win that ? ” Cause and 
effect are a little tedious ; how to leap to 
the result by short or by false means ? 
We are not scrupulous. What we ask is 
victory, without regard to the cause ; after 
the Rob Roy rule, after the Napoleon 
rule, to be the strongest to-day — the way 
of the Talleyrands — prudent people, 
whose watches go faster than their neigh • 
hours’, and who detect the first moment 
of decline, and throw themselves on the 
instant on the winning side. I have 
heard that Nelson used to say, ” Never 
mind the justice or the impudence, only 
let me succeed.” Lord Brougham s 
single duty of counsel is, “to get the 
prisoner clear.” Fuller says ‘tis a maxim 
of lawyers, ” that a crown once worn 
clears all defects of the wearer thereof.” 
Rien ne rSussit mieux que It succhs. And 
we Americans are tainted with this in- 
sanity, as our bankruptcies and our reck- 
less politics may show. Wo are great by 
exclusion, grasping, and egotism. Our 
success takes from all what it gives to 
one. 'Tis a haggard, malignant, care- 
worn running for luck. 

Egotism is a kind of buckram that gives 
momentary strength and concentration to 
men, and seems to be much used in 
nature for fabrics in which local and 
spasmodic energy is required, I could 

? H 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


47a 

point to men in this country of indis>.:^n- 
Bable importance to the carrying on of 
American life, of this humour, whom we 
could ill spare ; any one of them would be 
a national loss. But it spoils conversa- 
tion. They will not try conclusions with 
you. They are ever thrusting this pam- 
pered self between you and them. It is 
plain theyhave a long education to undergo 
to reach simplicity and plain-dealing, 
which are what a wise man mainly cares 
for in his companion. Nature knows how 
to convert evil to good ; Nature utilizes 
misers, fanatics, showmen, egotists, to 
accomplish her ends; but we must not 
think better of the foible for that. The 
passion for sudden success is rude and ■ 
puerile, just as war, cannons, and execu- 
tions are used to clear the ground of bad, 
lumpish, irreclaimable savages, but al - 1 
ways to the damage of the conquerors. 

I hate this shallow Americanism which 
hopes to get rich by credit, to get know- 
ledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn 
the economy of the mind by phrenology, 
or skill without study, or mastery without 
apprenticeship, or the sale of goods 
through pretending that they sell, or 
power through making believe you are 
powerful, or through a packed jury or 
caucus, bribery and “ repeating '• votes, 

, or wealth by fraud. They think they have 
got it, but they have got something else— 
a crime which calls for another crime, 
and another devil behind that : these are 
steps to suicide, infamy, and the harming 
of mankind. We countenance each other 
in this life of show, puffing, advertisement, 
and manufacture of public opinion : and 
excellence is lost sight of in the hunger 
for sudden performance and praise. 

There was a wise man, an Italian artist, 
Michael Angelo, who writes thus'of him- 
self : “ Meanwhile the Cardinal Ippolito, 
in whom all my best hopes were placed, 

, being dead, I began to understand that 
the promises of this world are, for the 
most part, vain phantoms, and that to 
confide in one's self, and become some- 
thing of worth and value, is the best and 
safest course.’* Now, though I am by no 
means sure that the reader will assent to 
all my propositions, yet I think we shall 
agree in my first rule for success — that 
we shall drop the brag and the advertise- 
ment, and take Michael Angelo's course, 

** to confide to one's self, and be some- 
thing of worth and value.” 

Each man has an aptitude bom with 
him to do easily some feat impossible to 
any other. Do your work. I have to say 


this often, but nature says it oftener. Tie 
clownish to insist on doing all with one’s 
own hands, as if every man should build 
his own clumsy house, forge his harauier, 
and bake his dough ; but he is to dare to 
do what he can do best ; not help others 
as they would direct him, but as he knowt 
his helpful power to be. To do otherwise 
is to neutralize all t/iose extraordinary 
special talents distributed among men. 
Yet, whilst this self-truth is essential to 
the exhibition of the world and to the 
growth and glory of each mind, it is rare 
to find a man who believes his own 
thought or who speaks that which he was 
created to say. As nothing astonishes 
men so much as common sense and plain- 
dealing, so nothing is more rare in any 
man than an act of his own. Any work 
looks wonderful to him except that which 
he can do. We do not believe our own 
thought; we must serve somebody; wo 
must quote somebody ; we dote on the 
old and the distant ; we are tickled by great 
names; we import the religion of other 
nations ; we quote their opinions ; w 6 
cite their laws. The gravest and learnedest 
courts in this country shudder to face a 
new question, and will wait months and 
years for a case to occur that can bo 
tortured into a precedent, and thus throw 
on a bolder party the onus of an in- 
itiative. Thus we do not carry a counsel 
in our breasts, or do not know it; and 
because we cannot shake off from 0111 
shoes this dust of Europe and Asia, the 
world seems to be born old, society is 
under a spell, every man is a borrower 
and a mimic, life is theatrical, and litera- 
ture a quotation ; and hence that depres- 
sion of spirits, that furrow of care, said to 
mark every American brow. 

Self-trust is the first secret of success, 
the belief that, if you are here, the 
authorities of the universe put you here, 
and for cause, or with some task strictly 
appointed you in your constitution, and 
so long as you work at that you are well 
and successful. It by no means consists 
in rushing prematurely to a showy feat 
that shall catch the eye and satisfy 
spectators. It is enough if you work ia 
the right direction. So far from the per- 
formance being the real success, it is 
clear that the success was much earlier 
than that, namely, when all the feats that 
make our civility were the thoughts of 
good heads. The fame of each discovery 
rightly attaches to the mind that mad«» 
the formula which contains all the details, 
and not to the manufacturers who nowt 



SUCCESS. 


make their gain by it ; although the mob 
uniformly cheers the publisher, and not 
the inventor. It is the dulnesa of the 
multitude that they cannot see the house, 
in the ground-plan ; the working, in the 
model of the projector. Whilst it is a 
thought, though it were a new fuel, or a 
new food, or the creation of agriculture, 
it is cried down ; it is a chimera : but 
when it is a fact, and comes in the shape 
of eight per cent., ten per cent., a hundred 
per cent., they cry, “It is the voice of 
God." Horatio Greenough, the sculptor, 
said to me of Robert Fulton’s visit to ; 
Paris: “Fulton knocked at the door of I 
Napoleon with steam, and was rejected ; i 
and Napoleon lived long enough to know 
that he had excluded a greater power j 
than his own.” 

Is there no loving of knowledge, and of 
art, and of our design, for itself alone ? 
Cannot we please ourselves with perform- 
ing our work, or gaining truth and power, 
without being praised for it ? I gain my 
point, I gain all points, if I can reach my 
companion with any statement which 
teaches him his own worth. The sum of 
wisdom is, that the time is never lost that 
is devoted to work. The good workman 
never says, “There, that will do;” but, 
(“There, that is it: try it, and come again, 

^ It will last always.” If the artist, in what- 
ever art, is well at work on his own design, 
j it signifies little that he does not yet find 
orders or customers. I pronounce that 
young man happy who is content with 
having acquired the skill which he had 
aimed at, and waits willingly when the 
occasion of making it appreciated shall 
arrive, knowing well that it will not loiter. 
The time your rival spends in dressing up 
his work for effect, hastily and for the 
market, you spend in study and experi- 
ments towards real knowledge and effi- 
ciency. He has thereby sold his picture 
or machine, or won the prize, or got the 
appointment ; but you have raised yourself 
into a higher school of art, and a few years 
will show the advantage of the real master 
over the short popularity of the showman. 

I know it is a nice point to discriminate j 
this self-trust, which is the pledge of all 
menta. vigour and performance, from the ' 
disease to which it is allied — the exagge* | 
ration of the part which we can play —yet 
they are two things. But it is sanity to 
know, that, over my talent or knack, and 
a million times better than any talent, is 
the central intelligence which subordinates 
and uses all talents ; and it is only as a 
door into this, that any talent or the know- 


473 

ledge it gives is of value He only who 
comes into this central intelligence in 
which no egotism or exaggeration can be, 
comes into self-possession. 

My next point is that, in the scale of 
powers, it is not talent but sensibility, 
which is best: talent confines, but the 
central life puts us in relation to all. How 
often it seems the chief good to be born 
with a cheerful temper, and well adjusted 
to the tone of the human race. Such a 
man feels himself in harmony., and con- 
scious by his receptivity of an infinite 
strength. Like Alfred, “ good fortune 
accompanies him like a gift of God.” Feel 
yourself, and be not daunted by things. 
'Tis the fulness of man that runs over into 
objects, and makes his Bibles and Shak- 
speares and Homers so great. The joyful 
reader borrows of his own ideas to fill 
their faulty outline, and knows not that he 
borrows and gives. 

There is something of poverty in our 
criticism. We assume that there are few 
great men, all the rest are little; that 
there is but one Homer, but one Shak- 
speare, one Newton, one Socrates. But 
the soul in her beaming hour does not 
acknowledge these usurpations. We should 
know how to praise Socrates, or Plato, or 
Saint John, without impoverishing us. In 
good hours we do not find Shakspeare or 
Homer over-great — only to have been 
translators of the happy present — and 
every man and woman divine possibilities. 
*Tis the good reader that makes the good 
book ; a good head cannot read amiss : in 
every book he finds passages which seem 
confidences or asides hidden from all else 
and Uil'mistakably meant for his ear. 

The light by which we see in this world 
comes out from the soul of the observer. 
Wherever any noble sentiment dwelt, it 
made the faces and houses around to 
shine. Nay, the powers of this busy brain 
are miraculous and illimitable. Therein 
are the rules and formulas by which the 
whole empire of matter is worked. Thera 
is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great 
material wealth of any kind, but if you 
trace it home, you will find it rooted in a 
thought of some individual man. 

Is all life a surface affair ? 'Tis curious, 
but our difference of wit appears to be only 
a difference of impressionability, or power 
to appreciate faint, fainter, and infinitely 
faintest voices and visions. When the 
scholar or the writer has pumped his brain 
for thoughts and verses, and then comes 
abroad into nature, has he never found 
that there is a better poetry hinted in a • 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


474 

boy’s whistle of a tune, or in the piping of 
a sparrow, than in all his literary results? 
We call it health. What is so admirable 
as the health of youth ?— with his long 
days because his eyes are good, and brisk 
circulations keep him warm in cold rooms, 
and he loves books that speak to the 
imagination ; and he can read Plato, co- 
vered to his chin with a cloak in a cold 
upper chamber, though he should associate 
the Dialogues ever after with a woollen 
smell. ’Tis the bane of life that natural 
effects are continually crowded out, and 
artificial arrangements substituted. We 
remember when, in early youth, the earth 
spoke and the heavens glowed ; when an 
evening, any evening, grim and wintry, 
sleet and snow, was enough for us; the 
houses were in the air. Now it costs a 
rare combination of clouds and lights to 
overcome the common and mean. What 
is it we look for in the landscape, in sunsets 
and sunrises, in the sea and the firma- 
ment? what but a compensation for the 
cramp and pettiness of human perform- 
ances ? We bask in the day, and the mind 
finds somewhat as great as itself. In 
Nature, all is large, massive repose. Re- 
member what befalls a city boy who goes 
for the first time into the October woods. 
He is suddenly initiated into a pomp and 
glory that brings to pass for him the 
dreams of romance. He is the king he 
dreamed he was ; he walks through tents 
of gold, through bowers of crimson, por- 
phyry, and topaz, pavilion on pavilion, 
garlanded with vines, flowers, and sun- 
beams, with incense and music, with 
so many hints to his astonished senses ; 
the leaves twinkle and pique and flatter 
him, and his eye and step are tempted on 
by what hazy distances to happier soli- 
tudes. All this happiness he owes only to 
his finer perception. The owner of the 
wood-lot finds only a number of dis- 
coloured trees, and says, “ They ought to 
come down; they aren’t growing any 
better; they should be cut and corded 
before spring.” 

Wordsworth writes of the delights of the 
boy in Nature: — 

^ For never will come back the hour 

Of splendour in the grass, of glory In the 
flower.” 

But I have just seen a man, well knowing 
what he spoke of, who told me that the 
verse was not true for him ; that his eyes 
opened as he grew older, and that every 
spring was more beautiful to him than the 
last. 


We live among gods of our own crea- 
tion. Does that deep-toned bell, which has 
shortened many a night of ill nerves, render 
to you nothing but acoustic vibrations ? Is 
the old church, which gave you the first 
lessons of religious life, or the village 
school, or the college where you first 
knew the dreams of fancy and joys ol 
thought, only boards or brick and mortar ? 
Is the house in which you were born, or 
the house in which your dearest friend 
lived, only a piece of real estate whose 
value is covered by the Hartford insur- 
ance ? You walk on the beach and enjoy 
the animation of the picture. Scoop up 
a little water in the hollow of your palm, 
take up a handful of shore sand ; well 
these are the elements. What is the 
beach but acres of sand ? what is the 
ocean but cubic miles of water ? a little 
more or less signifies nothing. No, it is 
that this brute matter is part of somewhat 
not brute. It is that the sand floor is held 
by spheral gravity, and bent to be a part 
of the round globe, under the optical sky 
— part of the astonishing astronomy, and 
existing, at last, to moral ends and from 
moral causes. 

The world is not made up to the eye of 
figures, that is, only half ; it is also made 
of colour. How that element washes the 
universe with its enchanting waves I The 
sculptor had ended his work, and behold a 
new world of dream-like glory. ’Tis the 
last stroke of Nature ; beyond colour she 
cannot go. In like manner, life is made 
up, not of knowledge only, but of love also. 
If thought is form, sentiment is colour. It 
clothes the skeleton world with space, 
variety, and glow. The hues of sunset 
make life great ; so the affections make 
some little web of cottage and fireside 
populous, important, and filling the main 
space in our history. 

The fundamental fact in our metaphysic 
constitution is the correspondence of man 
to the world, so that every change in that 
writes a record in the mind. The mind 
yields sympathetically to the tendencies 
or law which stream through things, and 
make the order of nature ; and in the per- 
fection of this correspondence or expres- 
I siveness, the health and force of man 
consist. If we follow this hint into our 
intellectual education, we shall find that 
it is not propositions, not new dogmas and 
a logical exposition of the world, that are 
our first need ; but to watch and tenderly 
cherish the intellectual and moral sensi- 
bilities, those fountains of right thought, 
and woo them to stay aad make their 



SUCCESS. 


homo with us. Whilst they abide with us, 
we shall not think amiss. Our perception 
far outruns our talent. We bring a wel- 
come to the highest lessons of religion 
and of poetry out of all proportion beyond 
our skill to teach. And, further, the great 
hearing and sympathy of men is more true 
and wise than their speaking is wont to be. 
A deep sympathy is what we require for 
any student of the mind ; for the chief 
difference between man and man is a dif- 
ference of impressionability. Aristotle, or 
Bacon, or Kant propound some maxim 
whicii is the key-note of philosophy thence- 
forward. But I am more interested to 
know, that, when at last they have hurled 
out their grand word, it is only some 
familiar experience of every man in the 
street. If it be not, it will never be heard 
of again. Ah 1 if one could keep this sensi- 
bility, and live in the happy sufficing pre- 
sent, and find the day and its cheap means 
contenting, which only ask receptivity in 
you, and no strained exertion and canker- 
ing ambition, overstimulating to be at the 
liead of your class and the head of society, 
and to have distinction and laurels and 
consumption! We are not strong by our 
power to penetrate, but by our relatedness. 
The world is enlarged for us, not by new 
objects, but by finding more affinities and 
potencies in those vre have. 

This sensibility appears in the homage 
to beauty which exalts the faculties of 
youth, in the power which form and 
colour exert upon the soul ; when we see 
eyes that are a compliment to the human 
race, features that explain the Phidian 
sculpture. Fontenelle said ; “ There are 
three things about which I have curiosity, 
though I know nothing of them — music, 
poetry, and love.” The great doctors of 
this science are the greatest men — Dante, 
Petrarch, Michael Angelo, and Shakspeare. 
The Vv^ise Socrates treats this matter with 
a certain archness, yet with very marked 
expressions. ‘‘ I am always,” ho says, 
” asserting that I happen to know, I may 
say, nothing but a mere trifle relating to 
matters of love ; yet in that kind of learn- 
ing I lay claim to being more skilled than 
any one man of the past or present time.” 
They may well speak in this uncertain 
manner of their knowledge, and in this 
confident manner of their will, for the 
secret of it is hard to detect, so deep it is ; 
and yet genius is measured by its skill in 
this science. 

Who is ho in youth or in maturity, or 
even in old age, who does not like to hear 
gf these sensibilities whic’i turn curled 


475 

heads round at church, tnd send wonder- 
ful eye-beams across assemblies, from one 
to one, never missing in the thickest 
crowd. The keen statist reckons by tens 
and hundreds ; the genial man is interested 
in every slipper that comes into the as- 
sembly. The passion, alike everywhere, 
croups under the snows of Scandinavia, 
under the fires of the equator, and swims 
in the seas of Polynesia. Lofn is as puis- 
sant a divinity in the Norse Edda as 
Camadeva in the red vault of India, Eros 
in the Greek, or Cupid in the Latin heaven. 
And what is specially true of love is, that 
it is a state of extreme impressionability ; 
the lover has more senses and finer senses 
than others ; his eye and ear are tele- 
graphs ; be reads omens on the flower, and 
cloud, and face, and form, and gesture, 
and reads them aright. In his surprise at 
the sudden and entire understanding that 
is between him and the beloved person, it 
occurs to him that they might somehow 
meet' independently of time and place. 
How delicious the belief that he could 
elude all guards, precautions, ceremonies, 
means, and delays, and hold instant and 
sempiternal communication ! In solitude, 
in banishment, the hope returned and the 
experiment was eagerly tried. The super- 
nal powers seem to lake his part. VVhat 
was on his lips to say is uttered by his 
friend. When he went abroad, he met, by 
wonderful casualties, the one person he 
sought. If in his walk he chanced to 
look back, his friend was walking behind 
him. And it has happened that the artist 
has often drawn in his pictures the face 
of the future wife whom he had not yet 
seen. 

But also in complacences, nowise so 
strict as this of the passion, the man of 
sensibility counts it a delight only to hear 
a child’s voice fully addressed to him, or 
to see the beautiful manners of the youth 
of either sex. When the event is past 
and remote, how insignificant the greatest 
compared with the piquancy of the pre- 
sent I To-day at the school examination' 
the professor interrogates Sylvina in the 
history class about Odoacer and Alaric. 
Sylvina can't remember, but suggests that 
Odoacer was defeated ; and the professor 
tartly replies, ” No, he defeated the 
Romans.” But 'tis plain to the visitor, 
that 'tis of no importance at all about 
Odoacer, and ’tis a great deal of import- 
ance about Sylvina; and if she says ho 
w.as defeated, why he had better, a great 
deal, have been defeated, than give her 
b moment's annoy. Odoacer, if there wm 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


476 


a particle of the gentleman in him, would 
have said, Let me be defeated a thousand 
times. 

And as our tenderness for youth and 
beauty gives a new and just importance to 
their fresh and manifold claims, so the like 
sensibility gives welcome to all excellence, 
has eyes and hospitality for merit in 
comers. An Englishman of marked char- 
acter and talent, who had brought with 
him hither one or two friends and a 
library of mystics, assured me that nobody 
and nothing of possible interest was left in 
England — he had brought all that was alive 
away. I was forced to reply : “ No, next 
door to you, probably, on the other side of 
the partition in the same house, was a 
greater man than any you had seen.” 
Every man has a history worth knowing, 
if he could tell it, or if we could draw it 
from him. Character and wit have their 
own magnetism. Send a deep man into 
any town, and he will find another deep 
man there, unknown hitherto to his neigh- 
bours. That is the great happiness of life 
— to add to our high acquaintances. The 
very law of averages might have assured 

ou that there will be in every hundred 

eads, say ten or five good heads. Morals 
are generated as the atmosphere is. 'Tis 
a secret, the genesis of either ; but the 
springs of justice and courage do not fail 
any more than salt or sulphur springs. 

The world is always opulent, the oracles 
are never silent ; but the receiver must by 
a happy temperance be brought to that 
top of condition, that frolic health, that he 
can easily take and give these fine com- 
munications. Health is the condition of 
wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness — an 
open and noble temper. There was never 
poet who had not the heart in the right 
place. The old trouveur, Pons Capdueil, 
wrote — 

Oft have I heard, and deem the witness true, 

Whom man delights in, God delights in too.” 

All beauty warms the heart, is a sign of 
health, prosperity, and the favour of God. 
Everything lasting and fit for men, the 
Divine power has marked with this stamp. 
What delights, what emancipates, not 
what scares and pains us, is wise and good 
in speech and in the arts. For, truly, the 
heart at the centre of the universe with 
every throb hurls the flood of happiness 
into every artery, vein, and veinlet, so that 
the whole system is inundated with the 
tides of joy. The plenty of the poorest 
place is too great : the harvest cannot be 
gathered. Every sound ends in music. 


The edge of every surface is tinged with 
prismatic rays. 

One more trait of true success. The 
good mind chooses what is positive, what 
is advancing — embraces the affirmative. 
Our system is one of poverty. ’Tis pre- 
sumed, as I said, there is but one Shak- 
speare, one Homer, one Jesus — not that 
all are or shall be inspired. But we must 
begin by affirming. Truth and goodness 
subsist for evermore. It is true there is 
evil and good, night and day; but these 
are not equal. The day is great and final. 
The night is for the day, but the day is 
not for the night. What is this immortal 
demand for more, which belongs to our 
constitution ? this enormous ideal ? Thero 
is no such critic and beggar as this ter- 
rible Soul. No historical person begins 
to content us. We know the satisfactori- 
ness of justice, the sufficiency of truth. 
We know the answer that leaves nothing 
to ask. We know the Spirit by its vic- 
torious tone. The searching tests to apply 
to every new pretender are amount and 
quality — what does he add ? and what is 
the state of mind he leaves me in ? Your 
theory is unimportant ; but what new 
stock you can add to humanity, or how 
high you can carry life ? A man is a 
man only as he makes life and nature 
happier to us. 

I fear the popular notion of success 
stands in direct opposition in all points 
to the real and wholesome success. One 
adores public opinion, the other private 
opinion ; one fame, the other desert ; one 
feats, the other humility ; one lucre, the 
other love ; one monopoly, and the other 
hospitality of mind . 

We may apply this affirmative law to 
letters, to manners, to art, to the decora- 
tions of our houses, etc. I do not find 
executions or tortures or lazar-houses, or 
grisly photographs of the field on the day 
after the battle, fit subjects for cabinet 
pictures. I think that some so-called 
•* sacred subjects ’’ must be treated with 
more genius than I have seen in the 
masters of Italian or Spanish art to be 
right pictures for houses and churches. 
Nature does not invite such exhibition. 
Nature lays the ground-plan of each 
Creature accurately— sternly fit for all his 
functions ; then veils it scrupulously. See 
how carefully she covers up the skeleton. 
The eye shall not see it; the sun shall 
not shine on it. She weaves her tissues 
and integuments of flesh and skin and 
hair and beautiful colours of the day over 
it and forces deat^ down underground 



OLD AGE, 


and makes haste to cover it up with leaves 
and vines, and wipes carefully out every 
trace by new creation. Who and what 
are you that would lay the ghastly ana- 
tomy bare. 

Don’t hang a dismal picture on the wall, 
and do not daub with sables and glooms 
in your conversation. Don’t be a cynic 
and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail 
and bemoan. Omit the negative proposi- 
tions. Nerve us with incessant affirma- 
tives. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, ' 
nor bark against the bad, but chant the 
beauty of the good. When that is spoken 
which has a right to be spoken, the 
chatter and the criticism will stop. Set 
down nothing that will not help some- 
body : 

For every t^ift of noble origin 

fa breathed upon by Hope's perpetual 
breath.’* 

The affirmative of affirmatives is love. 
As much love, so much perception. As 
caloric to matter, so is love to mind ; so it 
enlarges, and so it empowers it. Good- 
will makes insight, as one finds its way to 
the sea by embarking on a river. I have 
seen scores of people who can silence me, 
but I seek one who shall make me forget 
or overcome the frigidities and imbecili- 
ties into which I fall. The painter Giotto, 
Vasari tells us, renewed art, because he 
put more goodness into his heads. To 
awake in man and to raise the sense of 
worth, to educate his feeling and judg- 
ment so that he shall scorn himself for a 
Pad action, that is the only aim, 

’Tis cheap and easy to destroy. There 
is not a joyful boy or an innocent girl 
buoyant with fine purposes of duty, in all 
the street full of eager and rosy faces, 
but a cynic can chill and dishearten with 
a single word. Despondency comes readily 
enough to the most sanguine. The cynic 
has only to follow their hint with his 
bitter confirmation, and they check that 
eager courageous pace and go home with 
heavier step and premature age. They 
will themselves quickly enough give the 


477 

hint he wants to the cold wretch. Which 
of them has not failed to please where 
they most wished it ? or blundered where 
they were most ambitious of success ? or 
found themselves awkward or tedious or 
incapable of study, thought, or heroism, 
and only hoped by good sense and fidelity 
to do what they could and pass un blamed ? 
And this witty malefactor makes their 
little hope less with satire and scepticisme 
and slackens the springs of endeavour. 
Yes, this is easy ; but to help the young 
soul, add energy, inspire hope, and blow 
the coals into a useful flame ; to redeem 
defeat by new thought, by firm action, 
that is not easy, that is the work of divina 
men. 

We live on different planes or platforms. 
There is an external life, which is edu- 
cated at school, taught to read, write, 
cipher, and trade ; taught to grasp all the 
boy can get, urging him to put himself 
forward, to make himself useful and agree- 
able in the world, to ride, run, argue, and 
contend, unfold his talents, shine, conquer, 
and possess. 

But the inner life sits at home, and 
does not learn to do things, nor value 
these feasts at all. 'Tis a quiet, wise 
perception. It loves truth, because it is 
itself real ; it loves right, it knows nothing 
else ; but it makes no progress ; was as 
wise in our first memory of it as now ; is 
just the same now in maturity and here- 
after in age, it was in youth. We have 
grown to manhood and womanhood ; we 
have powers, connection, children, repu- 
tations, professions : this makes no account 
of tliem all. It lives in the great present ; 
it makes the present great. This tranquil, 
well-founded, wide-seeing soul is no ex- 
press-rider, no attorney, no magistrate, 
it lies in the sun, and broods on tho 
world. A person of this temper once said 
to a man of much activity, “ I will pardon 
you that you do so much, and you mo 
that I do nothing.” And Euripides says 
that “ Zeus hates busybodies and those 
who do too much/' 


OLD 

On the anniversary of the Phi Beta Kappa 
Society at Cambridge, in i86i, the vener- 
able President Quincy, senior member of 
the Society, as well as senior alumnus of 
the University, was received at the dinner 
with peculiar demonstrations of respect. 
He replied to these compliments in a 


AGE. 

speech, and, gracefully claiming the 
privileges of a literary society, entered at 
some length into an Apology for Old Age, 
and, aiding himself by notes in his hand, 
made a sort of running commentary on 
Cicero’s chapter “ De Senectute.” The 
character of the speaker, the transparent 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


478 

good faith of his praise and blame, and 
the nalveU of his eager preference of 
Cicero’s opinions to King David’s, gave 
unusual interest to the College festival. 
It was a discourse full of dignity, honour- 
ing him who spoke and those who heard. 

The speech led me to look over at home 
— an easy task — Cicero’s famous essay, 
charming by its rhetorical merit; heroic 
with Stoical precepts ; with a Roman eye 
to the claims of the State ; happiest, per- 
haps, in his praise of life on the farm ; and 
rising at the conclusion to a lofty strain. 
Hut he does not exhaust the subject; 
rather invites the attempt to add traits to 
the picture from our broader modern life. 

Cicero makes no reference to the illu- 
sions which cling to the element of 
time, and in which Nature delights. 
Wellington, in speaking of military men, 
said, “ What masks are these uniforms 
to hide cowards ! " I have often detected 
the like deception in the cloth shoe, 
wadded pelisse, wig, spectacles, and 
padded chair of Age. Nature lends her- 
self to these illusions, and adds dim sight, 
deafness, cracked voice, snowy hair, 
short memory, and sleep. These also are 
masks, and all is not Age that wears them. 
Whilst we yet call ourselves young, and 
our mates are yet youths with even 
boyish remains, one good fellow in the 
set prematurely sports a gray or a bald 
head, which does not impose on us who 
know how innocent of sanctity or of Pla- 
tonism he is, but does deceive his juniors 
and the public, who presently distinguish 
him with a most amusing respect : and 
this lets us into the secret, that the 
venerable forms that so awed our child- 
hood were just such impostors. Nature 
is full of freaks, and now puts an old 
head on young shoulders, and then a 
young heart beating under fourscore 
winters. 

For if the essence of age is not present, 
these signs, whether of Art or Nature, 
are counterfeit and ridiculous : and the 
essence of age is intellect. Wherever 
that appears, we call it old. If we look 
into the eyes of the youngest person, we 
sometimes discover that here is one who 
knows already what you would go about 
with much pains to teach him ; there is 
that in him which is the ancestor of all 
around him ; which fact the Indian Vedas 
express when they say, “ He that can dis- 
criminate is the father of his father.” And 
in our old British legends of Arthur and the 
Round Table, his friend and counsellor, 
Merlin the Wise* is a babe found exposed 


in a basket by the river-side, and, thotigti 
an infant of only a few days, speaks articu- 
lately to those who discover him, tells nifl 
name and history, and presently foretell* 
the fate of the bystanders. Wherever 
there is power, there is age. Don’t be 
deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you 
that babe is a thousand years old. 

Time is, indeed, the theatre and seat 
of illusion; nothing is so ductile and 
elastic. The mind stretches an hour to 
a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour. 
Saadi found in a mosque at Damascus an 
old Persian of a hundred and fifty years 
who was dying, and was saying to himself, 
” I said, coming into the world by birth, 
‘ I will enjoy myself for a few moments.' 
Alas 1 at the variegated table of life I 
partook of a few mouthfuls, and the Fates 
said, * Enough' 1" That which does not 
decay is so central and controlling in us, 
that, as long as one is alone by himself, 
he is not sensible of the inroads of time, 
which always begin at the surface-edges. 
If, on a winter day, you should stand 
within a bell-glass, the face and colour of 
the afternoon clouds would not indicate 
whether it were June or January; and if 
we did not find the reflection of ourselves 
in the eyes of the young people, we could 
not know that the century clock had 
struck seventy instead of twenty. How 
many men habitually believe that each 
chance passenger with whom they con- 
verse is of their own age, and presently 
find it was his father, and not his brother, 
whom they knew ? 

But not to press too hard on these 
deceits and illusions of Nature, which are 
inseparable from our condition, and look- 
ing at age under an aspect more con- 
formed to the common sense, if the 
question be the felicity of age, I fear the 
first popular judgments will be unfavour- 
able. From the point of sensuous ex- 
perience, seen from the streets and 
markets and the haunts of pleasure and 
gain, the estimate of age is low, melan- 
choly, and sceptical. Frankly face the 
facts, and see the result. Tobacco, coffee, 
alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, 
are weak dilutions : the surest poison is 
time. This cup, which Nature puts to 
our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpas- 
sing that cf any other draught. It opens 
the senses, adds power, fills us with 
exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, 
ambition, science; especially, it creates 
a craving for larger draughts of itself. 
But they who take the larger draughts are 
drunk with it, lose their stature strength, 



OLD AGE, 


fcoauty, and senses, and end in folly and 
delirium. We postpone our literary work 
until we have more ripeness and skill to 
write, and we one day discover that our 
literary talent was a youthful efferves- 
cence which we have now lost. We had 
a judge in Massachusetts who at sixty 
proposed to resign, alleging that he per- 
ceived a certain decay in his faculties ; he 
was dissuaded by his friends, on account 
of the public convenience at that time. 
At seventy it was hinted to him that it 
was time to retire ; but he now replied 
that he thought his judgment as robust, 
and all his faculties as good as ever they 
were. But besides the self-deception, the 
strong and hasty labourers of the street 
do not work well with the chronic valetu- 
dinarian. Youth is everywhere in place. 
Age, like woman, requires fit surround- 
ings. Age is comely in coaches, in 
churches, in chairs of state, and ceremony, 
In council-chambers, in courts of justice, 
and historical societies. Age is becoming 
in the country. But in the rush and 
uproar of Jhoadway, if you look into the 
faces of the passengers, there is dejection 
or indignation in the seniors, a certain 
concealed sense of injury, and the lip made 
up with a heroic determination not to 
mind it. Few envy the consideration 
enjoyed by the oldest inhabitant. We do 
not count a man’s years, until he has 
nothing else to count. The vast incon- 
venience of animal immortality was told 
in the fable of Tithonus, In short, the 
creed of the street is Old Age is not dis- 
graceful, but immensely disadvantageous. 
Life is well enough, but w^e shall all be 
glad to get out of it, and they will all be 
glad to have us. 

This is odious on the face of it. Uni- 
versal convictions are not to be shaken 
by the whimseys of overfed butchers and 
firemen, or by the sentimental fears of 
girls who v/ould keep the infantile bloom 
on their cheeks. We know the value of 
experience. Life and art are cumulative ; 
and he who has accomplished something 
in any department alone deserves to be 
heard on that subject. A man of great 
employments and excellent performance 
used to assure me that he did not think a 
man worth anything until he was sixty ; 
although this smacks a little of the reso- 
lution of a certain “ Young Men’s Repub- 
lican Club," that all men should be held 
eligible who were under seventy. But in I 
all governments the councils of power | 
were held by the old ; and patricians or 
(atres, senate or senes, seigneurs or I 


473 

seniors, gerousia, the Senate of Sparta, 
the presbytery of the Church, and tho 
like, all signify simply old men. 

The cynical creed or lampoon of tho 
market is refuted by the universal prayer 
for long life, which is the verdict of 
Nature, and justified by all history, We 
have, it is true, examples of an accelera* 
ted pace by which young men achieved 
grand works ; as in the Macedonian 
Alexander, in Raffaelle, Shakspeare, 
Pascal, Burns, and Byron ; but these are 
rare exceptions. Nature, in the main, 
vindicates her law. Skill to do comes of 
doing ; knowledge comes by eyes always 
open, and working hands ; and there is 
no knowledge that is not power. Beran^. 
ger said, “ Almost all the good workmen 
live long." And if the life be true and 
noble, we have quite another sort of 
seniors than the frowzy, timorous, peevish 
dotards who are falsely old — namely, the 
men who fear no city, but by whom cities 
stand ; who appearing in any street, the 
people empty their houses to gaze at and 
obey them : as at “ My Cid, with the fleecy 
beard," in Toledo ; or Bruce, as Barbour 
reports him ; as blind old Dandolo, elected 
Doge at eighty-four years, storming Con- 
stantinople at ninety-four, and after tho 
revolt again victorious, and elected at the 
age of ninety-six to the throne of tho 
Eastern Empire, which he declined, and 
died Doge at ninety-seven. We still feel 
the force of Socrates, " whom well-advised 
the oracle pronounced wisest of men ; " 
of Archimedes, holding Syracuse against 
the Romans by his wit, and himself better 
than all their nation ; of Michael Angelo, 
wearing the four crowns of architecture, 
sculpture, painting and poetry ; of Galileo, 
of whose blindness Castelli said, “ The 
noblest eye is darkened that Nature ever 
made — an eye that hath seen more than 
all that went before him, and hath opened 
the eyes of all that shall come after him ; " 
of Newton, who made an important dis- 
covery tor everyone of his eighty-five 
years ; of Bacon, who " took all knowledge 
to be his province; " of Fontenelle, " that 
precious porcelain vase laid up in the 
centre of France to be guarded with the 
utmost care for a hundred years ; " of 
Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams, the wise 
and heroic statesmen; of Washington, 
the perfect citizen ; of Wellington, the 
perfect soldier ; of Goethe, the all-knowing 
poet ; of Humboldt, the encyclopaedia of 
science. 

Under the general assertion of the welU 
being of age, we can easily count particu* 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDB. 


480 

lar benefits of that condition. It has 
weathered the perilous capes and shoals 
in the sea whereon we sail, and the chief 
evil of life is taken away in removing the 
grounds of fear. The insurance of a ship 
expires as she enters the harbour at home. 
It were strange, if a man should turn his 
sixtieth year without a feeling of immense 
relief from the number of dangers he has 
escaped. When the old wife says, “ Take 
care of that tumour in your shoulder, 
perhaps it is cancerous,” — he replies, ” I 
am yielding to a surer decomposition.” 
The humorous thief who drank a pot of 
beer at the gallows blew off the froth 
because he had heard it was unhealthy : 
but it will not add a pang to the prisoner 
marched out to be shot, to assure him 
that the pain in his knee threatens morti- 
fication. When the pleuro-pneumonia of 
the cows raged, the butchers said, that, 
though the acute degree was novel, there 
never was a time when this disease did 
not occur among cattle. All men carry 
Seeds of all distempers through life latent, 
and we die without developing them; 
such is the affirmative force of the consti- 
tiU'on ; but if you are enfeebled by any 
cause, some of these sleeping seeds start 
and open. Meantime, at every stage we 
lose a foe. At fifty years, 'tis said, 
afflicted citizens lose their sick-headaches. 
I hope this Hegira is not as movable a 
feast as that one I annually look for, when 
the horticulturists assure me that the 
rose-bugs in our garden disappear on the 
tenth of July; they stay a fortnight later 
in mine. But be it as it may with the 
sick-headache — ’tis certain that graver 
headaches and heart-aches are lulled once 
for all, as we come up with certain goals 
of time. The passions have answered 
tiieir purpose ; that slight but dread over- 
weight, with which, in each instance, 
Nature secures the execution of her aim, 
drops off. To keep man in the planet, 
she impresses the terror of death. To 
perfect the commissariat, she implants in 
each a certain rapacity to get the supply, 
and a little oversupply, of his wants. To 
insure the existence of a race, she rein- 
forces the sexual instinct, at the risk of 
disorder, grief, and pain. To secure 
strength, she plants cruel hunger and 
thirst, which so easily overdo their office, 
and invito disease. But these temporary 
stays and shifts for the protection of the 
young animal are shed as fast as they can 
be replaced by nobler resources. We 
live in youth amidst this rabble of pas- 
sions, quite too tender, quite too hungry 


and irritable. Later, the interiors of 
mind and heart open, and supply grander 
motives. We learn the fatal compensa* 
tions that wait on every act. Tnen — one 
after another— this riotous time-destroy- 
ing crew disappear. 

I count it another capital advantage of 
age, this, that a success more or less 
signifies nothing. Little by little, it has 
amassed such a fund of merit, that it can 
very well afford to go on its credit when 
it will. When I chanced to meet the poet 
Wordsworth, then sixty- three years old, 
he told me, ” that he had just had a fall 
and lost a tooth, and, when his com- 
panions were much concerned for the 
mischance, he replied, that he was glad 
it had not happened forty years before.” 
Well, Nature takes care that we shall not 
lose our organs forty years too soon. A 
lawyer argued a cause yesterday in the 
Supreme Court, and I was struck with a 
certain air of levity and defiance which 
vastly became him. Thirty years ago it 
was a serious concern to him whether his 
pleading was good and effective. Now it 
is of importance to his client, but of nona 
to himself. It has been long already fixed 
what he can do and cannot do, and hia 
reputation does not gain or suffer from 
one or a dozen new performances. If he 
should, on a new occasion, rise quite 
beyond his mark, and achieve somewhat 
great and extraordinary, that, of course, 
would instantly tell ; but he may go below 
his mark with impunity, and people will 
say, ** O, he had headache,” or, ” He lost 
his sleep for two nights.” What a lust of 
appearance, what a load of anxieties that 
once degraded him, he is thus rid of ! 
Every one is sensible of this cumulative 
advantage in living. All tiie good daya 
behind him are sponsors, who speak for 
him when he is silent, pay for him when 
he has no money, introduce him where he 
has no letters, and work for him when he 
sleeps. 

A third felicity of age is, that it has 
found expression. The youth suffers not 
only from ungratified desires, but from 
powers untried, and from a picture in his 
mind of a career which has as yet no 
outward reality. He is tormented with 
the want of correspondence between things 
and thoughts. Michael Angelo’s head is 
full of masculine and gigantic figures as 
gods walking, which make him savage 
until his furious chisel can render them 
into marble ; and of architectural dreamsi 
until a hundred stone-masons can lay 
them in coursai of travertine, There ia 



OLD AGE. 


481 


the like tempest in every good head in 
which some great benefit for the world is 
planted. The throes continue until the 
child is born. Every faculty new to each 
man thus goads him and drives him out 
into dolofiii deserts, until it finds proper 
vent. All the functions of human duty 
irritate and lash him forward, bemoaning 
lind chiding, until they are performed. He 
wants friends, employment, knowledge, 
power, house and land, wife and children, 
honour and fame; he has religious wants, 
aesthetic wants, domestic, civil, humane 
wants. One by one, day after day. he 
learns to coin his wishes into facts. He 
has his calling, homestead, social connec- 
tion, and personal power, and thus, at the 
end of fifty years, his soul is appeased by 
seeing some sort of correspondence be- 
tween his wish and his possession. This 
makes the value of age, the satisfaction it 
slowly offers to every craving. He is 
serene who does not feel himself pinched 
and wronged, but whose condition, in par- 
ticular and in general, allows the utterance 
of his mind. In old persons, when thus 
fully expressed, we often observe a fair, 
plump, perennial, waxen complexion, 
which indicates that all the ferment of 
earlier days has subsided into serenity of 
thought and behaviour. 

The compensations of Nature play in 
age as in youth. In a world so charged 
and sparkling with power, a man does not 
live long and actively without costly addi- 
tions of experience, which, though not 
spoken, are recorded in his mind. What 
to the youth is only a guess or a nope, is 
in the veteran a digested statute. He be- 
holds the feats of the juniors with com- 
placency, but as one who, having long ago 
known these games, has refined them into 
results and morals. The Indian Red 
Jacket, when the young braves were boast- 
ing their deeds, said, " But the sixties 
have all the tv/enties and forties in 
them.” 

For a fourth benefit, age sets its house 
in order, and finishes its works, which to 
every artist is a supreme pleasure. Youth 
has an excess of sensibility, before which 
every object glitters and attracts. We 
leave one pursuit for another, and the 
young man's year is a heap of beginnings. 
At the end of a twelvemonth he has no- 
thing to show for it — not one completed 
work. But the time is not lost. Our 
Instincts drove us to hive innumerable 
experiences, that are yet of no visible 
value and which we may keep for twice 
•even years before they shall be wanted.^ 


The best things are of secular growth*' 
The instinct of classifying marks the wise 
and healthy mind. Linnaeus projects his 
system, and lays out his twenty-four 
classes of plants, before yet he has found 
in Nature a single plant to justify certain 
of his classes. His seventh class has not 
one. In process of time, he finds with 
delight the little white Trientalis, the only 
plant with seven petals and sometimes 
seven stamens, which constitutes a seventh 
class in conformity with his system. The 
conchologist builds his cabinet whilst as 
vet he has few shells. He labels slkelves 
for classes, cells for species : all but a few 
are empty. But every year fills soma 
blanks, and with accelerating speed as he 
becomes knowing and known. An old 
scholar finds keen delight in verifying the 
impressive anecdotes and citations he has 
met with in miscellaneous reading and 
hearing, in all the years of youth. Wo 
carry in memory important anecdotes, and 
have lost all clue to the author from whom 
we had them. We have a heroic speech 
from Rome or Greece, but cannot fix it on 
the man who said it. We have an admir- 
able line worthy of Horace, ever and anon 
resounding in our mind’s ear, but have 
searched all probable and improbabla 
books for it in vain. We consult the read- 
ing men ; but, strangely enough, they who 
know everything know not this. But espe- 
cially we have a certain insulated thought, 
which haunts us, but remains insulated 
and barren. Well, there is nothing for all 
this but patience and time. Time, yes, 
that is the finder, the unweariable ex- 
plorer, not subject to casualties, omni- 
scient at last. The day comes when the 
hidden author of our story is found ; when 
the brave speech returns straight to the 
hero who said it; when the admirable 
verse finds the poet to whom it belongs ; 
and best of all, when the lonely thought, 
which seemed so wise, yet half- wise, half- 
thought, because it cast no light abroad, is 
suddenly matched in our mind by its twin, 
by its sequence, or next related analogy, 
which gives it instantly radiating power, 
and justifies the superstitious instinct with 
which we have hoarded it. We remembet 
our old Greek Professor at Cambridge, an 
ancient bachelor, amid his folios, pos- 
sessed by this hope of completing a task, 
with nothing to break his leisure after the 
three hours of his daily classes, yet ever 
restlessly stroking his leg, and assuring 
himself, ” he should retire from the Uni- 
versity and read the authors.” In Goethe’s 
Romance, Makaria. the central figure for 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 


wisdom and influence, pleases herself with 
withdrawing into solitude to astronomy 
and epistolary correspondence. Goethe 
himself carried this completion of studies 
to the highest point. Many of his works 
hung on the easel from youth to age, and 
received a stroke in every month or year. 
A literary astrologer, he never applied 
himself to any task but at the happy 
moment when all the stars consented. 
Bentley thought himself likely to live till 
fourscore— long enough to read everything 
that was worth reading — “ Et tunc magna 
mei sub terris ibit imago." Much wider is 
spread the pleasure which old men take 
in completing their secular affairs, the in- 
ventor his inventions, the agriculturist his 
experiments, and all old men in finishing 
their houses, rounding their estates, clear- 
ing their titles, reducing tangled interests 
to order, reconciling enmities, and leaving 
all in the best posture for the future. 
It must be believed that there is a pro- 
portion between the designs of a man 
and the length of his life: there is a 
calendar of his years, so of his perform- 
ances. 

America is the country of young men, 
and too full of work hitherto for leisure 
and tranquillity; yet we have had robust 
centenarians, and examples of dignity 
and wisdom. I have lately found in an 
old note-book a record of a visit to ex- 
President John Adams, in 1825, soon 
after the election of his son to the Presi- 
dency. It is but a sketch, and nothing 
important passed in the conversation ; but 
it reports a moment in the life of a heroic 
person, who, in extreme old age, appeared 
still erect and worthy of his fame. 

, Feb., 1825. To-day, at Quincy, 

with my brother, by invitation of Mr. 
Adams’s family. The old President sat 
in a large stuffed arm-chair, dressed in a 
blue coat, black small-clothes, white 
stockings ; a cotton cap covered his bald 
head. We made our compliment, told 
him he must let us join our congratula- 
tions to those of the nation on the happi- 
ness of his house. He thanked us, and 
said ; “ I am rejoiced, because the nation 
is happy. The time of gratulation and 
congratulations is nearly over with me *. I 
am astonished that I have lived to see 
and know of this event. I have lived now 
nearly a century ; The was ninety in the 
following October :J a long, harassed, and 
distracted life." I said, " The world 
thinks a good deal of joy has been mixed 
with it The world does not know," he 


replied, "how much toil, anxiety, anfl 
sorrow I have sufifered." — I asked if Mr. 
Adams’s letter of acceptance had been 
read to him. — "Yes,' he said, and added, 
" My son has more political prudence 
than any man that I know who has existed 
in my time; he never was put off his 
guard : and I hope he will continue such ; 
but what effect age may work in diminish- 
ing the power of his mind, I do not know ; 
it has been very much on the stretch, 
ever since he was born. He has always 
been laborious, child and man, from 
infancy.’’ — When Mr. J. Q. Adams’s age 
was mentioned, he said, " He is now 
fifty-eight, or will be in July;" and re- 
marked that " all the Presidents were of 
the same age: General Washington was 
about fifty-eight, and I was about fifty- 
eight, and Mr. Jefferson, and Mr. Madi- 
son, and Mr. Monroe." — Wo inquired 
when he expected to see Mr. Adams. — 
He said; "Never: Mr. Adams will not 
come to Quincy but to my funeral. It 
would be a great satisfaction to me to see 
him, but I don’t wish him to come on my 
account." — He spoke of Mr. Lechmere, 
whom he " v;ell remembered to have seen 
j come down daily, at a great age, to walk 
in the old town-house," — adding, " And I 
wish I could walk as well as ho did. He 
was Collector of the Customs for many 
years under the Royal Government." — E, 
said : " I suppose, sir, you would not have 
taken his place, even to walk as well as 
he." — " No," he replied, " that was not 
what I wanted." — He talked of Whitefield 
and "remembered when he was a Fresh- 
man in College, to have come into town 
to the Old South church, [I think,] to 
hear him, but could not get into the 
house; — I, however, saw him," he said, 

through a window, and distinctly heard 
all. He had a voice such as I never heard 
before or since. He cast it out so that 
you might hear it at the meeting-house, 
pointing towards the Quincy meeting- 
house, and he had the grace of a dancing- 
master, of an actor of plays ! His voice 
and manner helped him more than his 
sermons. I went with Jonathan Sewall." 
- ■' And you were pleased with him, 
sir ? " — " Pleased 1 I was delighted beyond 
measure.” — We asked if at Whitefield’a 
return the same popularity continued. — 
" Not the same fury," he said, " not the 
same wild enthusiasm as before, but a 
greater esteem, as he became more 
known. He did not terrify, but was 
admired." 

We spent about an hour in hm rootOr 



OLD 

He speaks very distinctly for so old a 
enters bravely into long sentences, which 
are interrupted by want of breath, but 
carries them invariably to a conclusion, 
without correcting a word. 

He spoke of the new novels of Cooper, 
and “ Peep at the Pilgrims,” and *' Sara- 
toga,” with praise, and named with accu- 
racy the characters in them. He likes to 
have a person always reading to him, or 
company talking in his room, and is better 
the next day after having visitors in his 
chamber from morning to night. 

He received a premature report of his 
son’s election, on Sunday afternoon, 
without any excitement, and told the 
reporter he had been hoaxed, for it was 
not yet time for any news to arrive. The 
informer, something damped in his heart, 
insisted on repairing to the meeting- 
house, and proclaimed it aloud to the 
congregation, who were so overjoyed that 
they rose ia their seats and cheered 


AGR, 483 

thrice. The ReTeread Mr. Whitney di8« 
missed them immediately. 

When life has been well spent, age is a 
loss of what it can well spare — muscular 
strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, 
and works that belong to these. But the 
central wisdom, which was old in infancy, 
is young in fourscore years, and, dropping 
off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects 
the mind purified and wise. I have 
heard that whoever loves is in no condi- 
tion old. I have heard, that, whenever 
the name of man is spoken, the doctrine 
of immortality is announced ; it cleaves 
to his constitution. The mode of it 
baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to 
us from the other side. But the inference 
from the working of intellect, hiving 
knowledge, hiving skill — at the end of 
life just ready to be born — affirms the 
inspirations of affection and of the moia! 
sentiment* 



4«4 


FORTUNE OP THE REPUBLIC. 


FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 


It is a rule that holds in economy as well 
as in hydraulics, that you must have a 
source higher than your tap. The mills, 
the shops, the theatre and the caucus, the 
college and the church, have all found out 
this secret. The sailors sail by chrono- 
meters that do not lose two or three 
seconds in a year, ever since Newton 
explained to Parliament that the way to im- 
prove navigation was to get good watches, 
and to offer public premiums for a better 
time-keeper than any then in use. The 
manufacturers rely on turbines of hy- 
draulic perfection; the carpet-mill, on 
mordants and dyes which exhaust the skill 
of the chemist ; the calico print, on de- 
signers of genius who draw tlie wages of 
artists, not of artisans. Wedgwood, the 
eminent potter, bravely took the sculptor 
Flaxman to counsel, who said, “ Send to 
Italy, search the museums for the forms 
of old Etruscan vases, urns, water-pots, 
domestic and sacrificial vessels of all 
kinds." They built great works and called 
their manufacturing village Etruria. Flax- 
man, with his Greek taste, selected and 
combined the loveliest forms, which were 
executed in English clay ; sent boxes of 
these as gifts to every court of Europe, 
and formed the taste of the world. It was 
a renaissance of the breakfast table and 
china-closet. The brave manufacturers 
made their fortune. The jewellers imi- 
tated the revived models in silver and 
gold. 

The theatre avails itself of the best 
talent of poet, of painter, and of amateur 
of taste, to make the ensemble of dramatic 
effect. The marine insurance office has 
its mathematical counsellor to settle ave- 
•-ages; the life-assurance, its table of 
annuities. The wine merchant has his 
analyst and taster, the more exquisite the 
better. He has also, I fear, his debts to 
the chemist as well as to the vineyard. 

Our modern wealth stands on a few 
staples, and the interest nations took in 
our war was exasperated by the import- 
ance of the cotton trade. And what is 
cotton ? One plant out of some two 
hundred thousand known to the botanist, 
vastly the larger part of which are reckoned 
weeds. And what is a weed? A plant 
whose virtues have not yet been discovered, 
every one of the two hundred thousand 
probably yet to be of utility in the arts. 
Ad Bacchus of the vino Ceres of the wheati 


as Arkwright and Whitney were the deCLi- 
gods of cotton, so prolific time will yet 
bring an inventor to every plant. There 
is not a property in nature but a mind is 
born to seek and find it. For it is not the 
plants or the animals, innumerable as 
they are, nor the whole magazine of ma- 
terial nature that can give the sum of 
power, but the infinite applicability of 
mese tnings in the hands of thinking man, 
every new application being equivalent to 
a new material. 

Our sleepy civilization, ever since Roger 
Bacon and Monk Schwartz invented gun- 
powder, has built its whole art of war, all 
fortification by land and sea, all drill and 
military education, on that one compound, 
all is an extension of a gun-barrel, and is 
very scornful about bows and arrows, and 
reckons Greeks and Romans and Middle 
Ages little better than Indians and bow- 
and-arrow times. As if the earth, water, 
gases, lightning and caloric had not a 
million energies, the discovery of any ona 
of which could change the art of war 
again, and put an end to war by the 
exterminating forces man can apply. 

Now, if this is true in all the useful and 
in the fine arts, that the direction must be 
drawn from a superior source or there 
will be no good work, does it hold less in 
our social and civil life ? 

In our popular politics you may note 
that each- aspirant who rises above the 
crowd, however at first making his obe- 
dient apprenticeship in party tactics, if ha 
have sagacity, soon learns that it is by no 
means by obeying the vulgar weathercock 
of his party, the resentments, the fears, 
and whims of it, that real power is gained, 
but that he must often face and resist the 
party, and abide by his resistance, and 
put them in fear; that the only title to 
their permanent respect, and to a larger 
following, is to see for himself what is the 
real public interest, and to stand for that ; 
that is a principle, and all the cheering 
and hissing of the crowd must by and by 
accommodate itself to it. Our times easily 
afford you very good examples. 

The law of water and all fluids is true 
of wit. Prince Metternich said, ** Revo- 
lutions begin in the best heads and run 
steadily down to the populace." It is a 
very old observation ; not truer because 
Metternich said it, and not less true. 

There have been revolutions which were 



FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC, 


not in the interest of feudalism and bar- 
barism, but in that of society. And these 
are distinguished not by the numbers of 
the combatants nor the numbers of the 
slain, but by the motive. No interest 
now attaches to the wars of York and 
Lancaster, to the wars of German, French, 
and Spanish emperors, which were only 
dynastic wars, but to those in which a 
principle was involved. These are read 
with passionate interest, and never lose 
their pathos by time. When the cannon 
is aimed by ideas, when men with religious 
convictions are behind it, when men die 
for what they live for, and the mainspring 
that works daily urges them to hazard all 
then the cannon articulates its explosions 
with the voice of a man, then the rifle 
seconds the cannon and the fowling-piece 
the rifle, and the women make the car- 
tridges, and all shoot at one mark ; then 
gods join in the combat ; then poets are 
born, and the better code of laws at last 
records the victory. 

Now the culmination of these triumphs 
of humanity — and which did virtually in- 
clude the extinction of slavery — is the 
planting of America. 

At every moment some one country 
more than any other represents the senti- 
ment and the future of mankind. None 
will doubt that America occupies this 
place in the opinion of nations, as is 
proved by the fact of the vast immigration 
into this country from all the nations of 
Western and Central Europe. And when 
the adventurers have planted themselves 
and looked about, they send back all the 
money they can spare to bring their 
friends. 

Meantime they find this country just 
passing through a great crisis in its 
history, as necessary as lactation or den- 
tition or puberty to tlie human individual. 
We are in these days settling for ourselves 
and our descendants questions which, as 
they shall be determined in one way or 
the other, will make the peace and pros- 
perity or the calamity of the next ages. 
The questions of Education, of Society, 
of Labour, the direction of talent, of 
character, the nature and habits of the 
American, may well occupy us, and more 
the question of Religion. 

The new conditions of mankind in 
America are really favourable to progress, 
the removal of absurd restrictions and 
antique inequalities. The mind is always 
better the more it is used, and here it is 
kept in practice. The humblest is daily 
challenged to give his opinion on pr^tical 


485 

questions, and while civil and social free- 
dom exists, nonsense even has a favour- 
able effect. Cant is good to provoke 
common sense. The Catholic Church, 
the trance-mediums, the rebel paradoxes, 
exasperate the common sense. The wilder 
the paradox, the more sure is Punch to 
put it in the pillory. 

The lodging the power in the people, 
as in republican forms, has the effect of 
holding things closer to common sense : 
for a court or an aristocracy, which must 
always be a small minority, can moro 
easily run into follies than a republic, 
which has too many observers — each with 
a vote in his hand— to allow its head to 
be turned by any kind of nonsence ; since 
hunger, thirst, cold, the cries of children, 
and debt are always holding the masses 
hard to the essential duties. 

One hundred years ago the American 
people attempted to carry out the bill of 
political rights to an almost ideal perfec- 
tion. They have made great strides in 
that direction since. They are now pro- 
ceeding, instructed by their success, and 
by their many failures, to carry out, not 
the bill of rights, but the bill of human 
duties. 

And look what revolution that attempt 
involves. Hitherto government has been 
that of the single person or of the aris- 
tocracy. In this country the attempt to 
resist these elements, it is asserted, must 
tlirow us into the government not quite 
of mobs, but in practice of an inferior 
class of professional politicians, who by 
means of newspapers and caucuses really 
thrust their unworthy minority into the 
place of the old aristocracy on the one 
side, and of the good, industrious, well- 
taught but unambitious population on the 
other, win the posts of power, and give 
their direction to affairs. Hence liberal 
congresses and legislatures ordain, to the 
surprise of the people, equivocal, interested, 
and vicious measures. The men them- 
selves are suspected and charged with 
lobbying and being lobbied. No measure 
is attempted for itself, but the opinion of 
the people is courted in the first place, 
and the measures are perfunctorily car- 
ried through as secondary. We do not 
choose our own candidate, no, nor any 
other man’s first choice — but only the 
available candidate, whom, perhaps, no 
man loves. We do not speak what wo 
think, but grope after the practicable and 
available. Instead of character, there is 
a studious exclusion of character. The 
people feared and flattered. They 



FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 


486 

are not reprimanded. The country is 1 
governed in bar-rooms, and in the mind | 
of bar-rooms, The low can best win the 
low, and each aspirant for power vies , 
with his rival which can stoop lowest, and 
depart widest from himself. 

The partisan on moral, even on religious 
questions, will choose a proven rogue who 
can answer the tests, over an honest, 
affectionate, noble gentleman; the par- 
tisan ceasing to be a man that he may be 
a sectarian. 

The spirit of our political economy is 
low and degrading. The precious metals 
are not so precious as they are esteemed. 
Man exists for his own sake, and not to 
add a labourer to the state. The spirit of 
our political action, for the most part, 
considers nothing less than the sacredness 
of man, Party sacrifices man to the 
measure. 

We have seen the great party of property 
and education in the country drivelling 
and huckstering away, for views of party 
fear or advantage, every principle of hu- 
manity and the dearest hopes of mankind ; 
the trustees of power only energetic when 
mischief could be done, imbecile as 
corpses when evil was to be prevented. 

Our great men succumb so far to the 
forms of the day as to peril their integrity 
for the sake of adding to the weight of 
their personal character the authority of 
office, or making a real government titular. 
Our politics are full of adventurers, who 
having by education and social innocence 
a good repute in the state, break away 
from the law of honesty and think they 
can afford to join the devil’s party. 'Tis 
odious, these offenders in high life. You 
rally to the support of old charities and 
the cause of literature, and there, to be 
sure, are these brazen faces. In this 
innocence you are puzzled how to meet 
them ; must shake hands with them under 
protest. We feel toward them as the mi- 
nister about the Cape Cod farm, in the old 
time when the minister was still invited, 
in the spring, to make a prayer for the 
blessing of a piece of land, the good pastor 
being brought to the spot, stopped short : 
“ No, this land does not want a prayer, 
this land wants manure." 

*Tis virtue which they want, and, wanting it, 

Honour no garment to their backs can fit.” 

Parties keep the old names, but exhibit 
a surprising fugacity in creeping out of 
one snake-skin into another of equal 
Ignominy and lubricity, and the grassy- 


hopper on the turret of Faneuil Hall gives 
a proper hint of the men below, 

Everything yields. The very glaciers 
are viscous or relegate into conformity, 
and the stiffest patriots falter and com- 
promise ; so that will cannot be depended 
on to save us. 

How rare are acts of will ! We are all 
living according to custom; we do as 
other people do, and shrink from an act 
of our own. Every such act makes a man 
famous, and we can all count the few cases, 
half a dozen in our time, when a public 
man ventured to act as he thought, without 
waiting for orders or for public opinion. 
John Quincy Adams was a man of an 
audacious independence that always kept 
the public curiosity alive in regard to 
what he might do. None could predict 
his word, and a whole congress could not 
gainsay it when it was spoken. General 
Jackson was a man of will, and his phrase 
on one memorable occasion, “ I will take 
the responsibility," is a proverb ever 
since. 

The American marches with a careless 
swagger to the height of power, very 
heedless of his own liberty, or of other 
people’s, in his reckless confidence that 
he can have all he wants, risking all the 
prized charters of the human race, bought 
with battles and revolutions and religion, 
gambling them all away for a paltry selfish 
gain. 

He sits secure in the possession of his 
vast domain, rich beyond all experience 
in resources, sees its inevitable force 
unlocking itself in elemental order day by 
day, year by year; looks from his coal- 
fields, his wheat-bearing prairie, his gold- 
mines, to his two oceans on either side, 
and feels the security that there can be no 
famine in a country reaching through so 
many latitudes, no want that cannot be 
supplied, no danger from any excess of 
importation of art or learning into a 
country of such native strength, such 
immense digestive power. 

In proportion to the personal ability of 
each man, he feels the invitation and 
career which the country opens to him/ 
He is easily fed with wheat and game, 
with Ohio wine, but his brain is also 
pampered by finer draughts, by political 
power and by the power in the railroad 
board, in the mills, or the banks. This 
elevates his spirits, and gives, of course, 
an easy self-reliance that makes him self- 
willed and unscrupulous. 

I think this levity is a reaction on the 
people from the extraordinary advantages 



FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 


and invitations of their condition. When 
we are most disturbed by their rash and 
immoral voting, it is not malignity, but 
recklessness. They are careless of politics, 
because they do not entertain the possi- 
bility of being seriously caught in meshes 
of legislation. They feel strong and 
irresistible. They believe that what they 
have enacted t^ey can repeal if they do 
not like it. But one may run a risk once 
too often. They stay away from the polls, 
saying that one vote can do no good I Or 
they take another step, and say one vote 
can do no harm ! and vote for something 
which they do not approve, because their 
party or set votes for it. Of course this 
puts them in the power of any parry 
having a steady interest to promote, which 
docs not conflict manifestly with the 
pecuniary interest of the voters. But if 
they should come to be interested in 
themselves and in their career, they would 
no more stay away from the election than 
from their own counting-room or the 
house of their friend. 

The people are right-minded enough on 
ethical questions, but they must pay their 
debts, and must have the means of living 
well, and not pinching, So it is useless 
to rely on them to go to a meeting, or to 
give a vote, if any check from this must- 
have-the-money side arises. If a cus- 
tomer looks grave at their new'spaper, or 
damns their member of Congress, they 
take another newspaper, and vote for 
another man. They must have money, 
for a certain style of living fast becomes 
necessary; they must take wine at the 
hotel, first, for the look of it, and second, 
for the purpose of sending the bottle to 
two or three gentlemen at the table ; and 
presently, because they have got the 
taste, and do not feel that they have dined 
without iV. 

The record of the election now and then 
alarms people by the all but unanimous 
choice of a rogue and brawler. But how 
was it done ? What lawless mob burst 
into the polls and threw in these hundreds 
of ballots in defiance of the magistrates ? 
This was done by the very men you know, 
the mildest, most sensible, best-natured 
people. The only account of this is, that 
they have been scared or warped into 
some association in their mind of the 
candidate with the interest of their trade 
or of their property, 

Whilst each cabal urges its candidate, 
and at last brings, with cheers and street- 
demonstrations, men whose names are a 
kneii tg hope Qf prpgrQss, th^ good au4 


487 

wise are hidden in their active retirements, 
and are quite out of question. 

“ These we must join to wake, for these are of 
the strain 

That justice dare defend, and will the age 
maintain.’* 

Yet we know, all over this country, mtn 
of integrity, capable of action and of 
affairs, with the deepest sympathy in all 
that concerns the public, mortified by the 
national disgrace, and quite capable of 
any sacrifice except of their honour. 

Faults in the working appear in our 
system, as in all, but they suggest their 
own remedies. After every practical mis- 
take, out of which any disaster grows, the 
people wake and correct it with energy. 
And any disturbances in politics, in civil 
or foreign wars, sober them, and instantly 
show more virtue and conviction in the 
popular vote. In each new threat of 
faction the ballot has been, beyond ex- 
pectation, right and decisive. 

’Tis ever an inspiration, God only knows 
whence; a sudden, undated perception of 
eternal right coming into and correcting 
things that were wrong ; a perception that 
passes through thousands as readily as 
through one. 

The gracious lesson taught by science 
to this country is, that the history of 
nature from first to last is incessant ad- 
vance from less to more, from rude to 
finer organization, the globe of matter 
thus conspiring with the principle of 
undying hope in man. Nature works in 
immense time, and spends individuals and 
races prodigally to prepare new indi- 
viduals and races. The lower kinds are 
one after one extinguished ; the higher 
forms come in. The history of civilization, 
or the refining of certain races to won- 
derful powers of performance, is ana- 
logous; but the best civilization yet is 
only valuable as a ground of hope. 

Ours is the country of poor men. Hero 
is practical democracy ; here is the human 
race poured out over the continent to do 
itself justice; all mankind in its shirt- 
sleeves; not grimacing like poor rich men 
in cities, pretending to be rich, but un- 
mistakably taking off its coat to hard 
work, when labour is sure to pay. This 
through all the country. For really, 
though you see wealth in the capitals, it 
is only a sprinkling of rich men in the 
cities and at sparse points; the bulk ot 
the population is poor. In Maine, nearly 
QVery is a lumberer. In Massachu- 



FORTUNE OP THE REPUBLIC. 


488 

Betts, every twelfth man is a shoemaker, 
and the rest, millers, farmers, sailors, 
fishermen. 

Well, the result is, instead of the doleful 
experience of the European economist, 
who tells us, “ In almost all countries the 
condition of the great body of the people 
is poor and miserable," here that same 
great body has arrived at a sloven plenty, 
ham and corn-cakes, tight roof, and coals 
enough have been attained , an unbuttoned 
comfort, not clean, not thoughtful, far 
from polished, without dignity in his 
repose ; the man awkward and restless if 
he have not something to do, but honest 
and kind, for the most part, understanding 
his own rights and stiff to maintain them, 
and disposed to give his children a better 
education than he received. 

The steady improvement of the public 
schools in the cities and the country 
enables the farmer or labourer to secure 
a precious primary education. It is rare 
to find a born American who cannot read 
and write. The facility with which clubs 
3ire formed by young men for discussion 
of social, political and intellectual topics 
secures the notoriety of the questions. 

Our institutions, of which the town is 
the unit, are all educational, for respon- 
sibility educates fast. The town meeting 
is, after the high school, a higher school. 
The legislature, to which every good 
farmer goes once on trial, is a superior 
academy. 

The result appears in the power of in- 
vention, the freedom of thinking, in the 
readiness for reforms, eagerness for 
novelty, even for all the follies of false 
science; in the antipathy to secret so- 
cieties, in the predominance of the 
Democratic party in the politics of the 
Union, and in the voice of the public 
even when irregular and vicious — the 
voice of mobs, the voice of lynch law — 
because it is thought to be, on the whole, 
the verdict, though badly spoken, of the 
greatest number. 

All this forwardness and self-reliance 
cover self-government; proceed on the 
belief that as the people have made a 
government they can make another ; that 
their union and law are not in their 
memory, but in their blood and condition. 
If they unmake a law, they can easily 
make a new one. In Mr. Webster’s ima- 
gination the American Union was a huge 
Prince Rupert’s drop, which will snap 
into atoms, if so much as the smallest end 
he shivered off. Now the fact is quite 
different from this. The people are loyali 


law-abiding. They prefer order, ind hate 
no taste for misrule and uproar. 

America was opened after the feudal 
mischief was spent, and so the people 
made a good start. We began well. No 
inquisition here, no kings, no nobles, no 
dominant church. Here heresy has lost 
its terrors. We have eight or ten reli- 
gions in every large town, and the most 
that comes of it is a degree or two on the 
thermometer of fashion ; a pew in a par- 
ticular church gives an easier entrance to 
the subscription ball. 

We began with freedom, and are de- 
fended from shocks now for a century by 
the facility with which, through popular 
assemblies, every necessary measure of 
reform can instantly be carried. A con- 
gress is a standing insurrection, and 
escapes the violence of accumulated 
grievance. As the globe keeps its iden- 
tity by perpetual change, so our civil 
system, by perpetual appeal to the people 
and acceptance of its reforms. 

The government is acquainted with the 
opinions of all classes, knows the leading 
men in the middle class, knows the leaders 
of the humblest class. The President 
comes near enough to these ; if he does 
not, the caucus does— the primary ward 
and town meeting, and what is important 
does reach him. 

The men, the women, all over this land 
shrill their exclamations of impatience 
and indignation at what is short-coming 
or is unbecoming in the government — at 
the want of humanity, of morality— ever 
on broad grounds of general justice, and 
not on the class-feeling which narrows the 
perception of English, French, German 
people at home. 

In this fact, that we are a nation of 
individuals, that we have a highly intel- 
lectual organization, that we can see and 
feel moral distinctions, and that on such 
an organization sooner or later the moral 
laws must tell, to such ears must speak — • 
in this is our hope. For if the prosperity 
of this country has been merely the obe- 
dience of man to the guiding of nature— 
of great rivers and prairies — yet is there 
fate above fate, if we choose to speak this 
language ; or, if there is fate in corn and 
cotton, so is there fate in thought — this, 
namely, that the largest thought and the 
widest love are born to victory, and must 
prevail. 

The revolution la the work of no man, 
but the eternal effervescence of nature, 
It never did not work. And we say that 
revolutions beat all the insurgents» be 



FORTUNE OP THE REPUBLIC. 4®^ 

they never so determined and politic; other, and this superstitionsly, and not 
that the great interests of mankind, being from insight of his merit. They follow a 
at every moment through ages in favour fact ; they follow success, and not skill, 
of justice and the largest liberty, will Therefore, as soon as the success stops 
always, from time to time, gain on the and the admirable man blunders, they 
adversary and at last win the day. Never quit him; already they remember that 
country had such a fortune, as men call tiey long ago suspected his judgment, 
fortune, as this, in its geography, its and they transfer the repute of judgment 
history, and in its majestic possibilities, to the next prosperous person who has 
We have much to learn, much to cor- not yet blundered. Of course this levity 
rect— a great deal of lying vanity. The makes them as easily despond. It seems 
spread eagle must fold his foolish wings as if history gave no account of any society 
and be less of a peacock ; must keep his in which despondency came so readily to 
wings to carry the thunderbolt when he heart as we see it and feel it in ours, 
is commanded. We must realise our Young men at thirty and even earlier lose 
rhetoric and our rituals. Our national all spring and vivacity, and if they fail in 
flag is not affecting, as it should be, be- their first enterprise throw up the game, 
cause it does not represent the population The source of mischief is the extrema 
of the United States, but some Baltimore difficulty with which men are roused from 
or Chicago or Cincinnati or Philadelphia the torpor of every day. Blessed is all 
caucus; not union or justice, but selfish- that agitates the mass, breaks up this 
ness and cunning. If we never put on torpor, and begins motion. Corpora non 
the liberty-cap until we were freemen by agunt nisi soluta ; the chemical rule is 
love and self-denial, the liberty-cap would true in mind. Contrast, changes, inter- 
mean something. 1 wish to see America ruption, are necessary to new activity and 
not like the old powers of the earth, new combinations, 

f rasping, exclusive and narrow, but a If a temperate wise man should look 
enefactor such as no country ever was, over our American society, I think the 
hospitable to all nations, legislating for first danger that would excite his alarm 
9ll nationalities. Nations were made to would be the European influences on this 
help each other as much as families were ; country. We buy much of Europe that 
and all advancement is by ideas, and not does not make us better men ; and mainly 
by brute force or mechanic force. the expensiveness which is ruining that 

In this country, with our practical un- country. We import trifles, dancers, 
derstanding, there is, at present, a great singers, laces, books of patterns, modes, 
sensualism, a headlong devotion to trade gloves and cologne, manuals of Gothic 
and to the conquest of the continent — to architecture, steam - made ornaments, 
each man as large a share of the same as America is provincial. It is an immense 
he can carve for himself— an extravagant Halifax, See the secondariness and aping 
confidence in our talent and activity, of foreign and English life, that runs 
which becomes, whilst successful, a scorn- through this country, in building, in dress, 
ful materialism— but with the fault, of in eating, in books. Every village, every 
course, that it has no depth, no reserve city has its architecture, its costume, its 
force whereon to fall back when a reverse hotel, its private house, its church, from 
c^mes. England. 

That repose which is the ornament and Our politics threaten her. Her manners 
ripeness of man is not American. That threaten us. Life is grown and growing 
repose which indicates a faith in the laws so costly, that it threatens to kill us. A 
of the universe— a faith that they will man is coming here as there to value him- 
fulfil themselves, and are not to be im- self on what he can buy. Worst of all his 
|)eded, transgressed, or accelerated. Our expense is not his own, but a far-off copy 
people are too slight and vain. They are of Osborne House or the Elys6e. The 
easily elated and easily depressed. See tendency of this is to make all men alike ; 
how fast they extend the fleeting fabric of to extinguish individualism and choke up 
their trade — not at all considering the re- all the channels of inspiration from God 
mote reaction and bankruptcy, but with in man. We lose our invention and do* 
the same abandonment to the moment scend into imitation. A man no longer 
and the facts of the hour as the Esquimaux conducts his own life. It is manufac- 
who sells his bed in the morning. Our tured for him. The tailor makes your 
people act on the moment, and firom ex- dress ; the baker your bread ; the up- 
ternri impulse. They all lean on some hoisted — from an imported book of 



FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC, 


490 

patterus— your furniture; the Bishop of 
London your faith. 

In the planters of this country, in the 
seventeenth century, the conditions of the 
country combined with the impatience of 
arbitrary power which they brought from 
England, forced them to a wonderful per- 
sonal independence and to a certain heroic 
planting and trading. Later this strength 
appeared in the solitudes of the West, 
where a man is made a hero by the varied 
emergencies of his lonely farm, and neigh- 
bourhoods must combine against the 
Indians, or the horse-thieves, or the river 
rowdies, by organizing themselves into 
committees of vigilance. Thus the land 
and sea educate the people, and bring out 
presence of mind, self-reliance, and hun- 
dred - handed activity. These are the 
people for an emergency. They are not 
to be surprised, and can find a way out of 
any peril. This rough and ready force 
becomes them, and makes them fit citizens 
and civilizers. But if we found them 
clinging to English traditions, which are 
graceful enough at hom«* as the English 
Church, and entailed estates, and distrust 
of popular election, we should feel this 
reactionary and absurdly out of place. 

Let the passion for America cast out 
the passion for Europe. Here let there 
be what the earth waits for — exalted man- 
hood. What this country longs for is 
personalities, grand persons, to counteract 
its materialities. For it is the rule of the 
universe that corn shall serve man, and 
not man corn. 

They who find America insipid— they 
for whom London and Paris have spoiled 
their own homes, can be spared to return 
to those cities. I not only see a career at 
home for more genius than we have, but 
for more than there is in the world. 

The class of which I speak make them- 
selves merry without duties. They sit in 
decorated club-houses in the cities, and 
burn tobacco and play whist ; in the coun- 
try they sit idle in stores and bar-rooms, 
and bum tobacco, and gossip and sleep. 
They complain of the flatness of American 
life ; “ America has no illusions, no ro- 
mance.” They have no perception of its 
destiny. They are not Americans. 

The felon is the logical extreme of the 
epicure and coxcomb. Selfish luxury is 
the end of both, though in one it is deco- 
rated with refinements, and in the other 
brutal. But my point now is, that this 
spirit is not American. 

Our young men lack idealism. A man 
fpr succors pust not be pure idealist, then 


he will practically fail ; but he mast have 
ideas, must obey ideas, or he might as 
well be the horse he rides on. A man 
does not want to be sun-dazzled, sun- 
blind ; but every man must have glimmer 
enough to keep him from knocking his 
head against the walls, And it is in the 
interest of civilization and good society 
and friendship, that I dread to hear of 
well-born, gifted, and amiable men, that 
they have this indifference, disposing them 
to this despair. 

Of no use are the men v.'ho study to do 
exactly as was done before, who can never 
understand that to-day is a new day. 
There never was such a combination as 
! this of ours, and the rules to meet it are 
not set down in any history. Wo want 
men of original perception and original 
action, who can open their eyes wider 
than to a nationality — namely, to con- 
siderations of benefit to the human race 
— can act in the interest of civilization ; 
men of elastic, men of moral mind, who 
can live in the moment and take a step 
forward, Columbus was no backward- 
creeping crab, nor was Martin Luther, 
nor John Adams, nor Patrick Henry, nor 
Thomas Jefferson ; and the Genius or 
Destiny of America is no log or sluggard, 
but a man incessantly advancing, as the 
shadow on the dial’s face, or the heavenly 
body by whose light it is marked. 

The flowering of civilization is the 
finished man, the man of sense, of grace, 
of accomplishment, of social power — the 
gentleman. What hinders that he bo 
born here ? The new times need a new 
man, the complemental man, whom plainly 
I this country must furnish. Freer swing 
his arms ; farther pierce his eyes ; more 
forward and forthright his whole build and 
rig than the Englishman’s, who, we see, is 
much imprisoned in his backbone. 

’Tis certain that our civilization is yet 
incomplete, it has not ended, nor given 
sign of ending, in a hero. 'Tis a wild 
democracy ; the riot of mediocrities and 
dishonesties and fudges. Ours is the ago 
of the omnibus, of the third person plural, 
of Tammany Hall. 

Is it that nature has only so much vital 
force, and must dilute it if it is to be mul- 
tiplied into millions ? The beautiful is 
never plentiful. Then Illinois and Indiana, 
with their spawning loins, must needs bo 
ordinary. 

It is not a question whether we shall ba 
a multitude of people. No, that has been 
conspicuously decided already ; but whe- 
ther we 9haU be t|ie new natipn, the guide 



FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC, 


and Uwgiver 6f all nations, as having 
tlearly chosen and firmly held the sim- 
plest and best rule of political society. 

Now, if the spirit which years ago 
armed this country against rebellion, and 
put forth such gigantic energy in the 
charity of the Sanitary Commission, could 
be waked to the conserving and creating 
duty of making the laws just and humane, 
it were to enroll a great constituency of 
religious, self-respecting, brave, tender, 
faithful obeyers of duty, lovers of men, 
filled with loyalty to each other, and with 
the simple and sublime purpose of carry- 
ing out in private and in public action the 
desire and need of mankind. 

Here is the post where the patriot 
should plant himself ; here the altar where 
virtuous young men, those to whom friend- 
ship is the dearest covenant, should bind 
each other to loyalty, where genius should 
kindle its fires and bring forgotten truth 
to the eyes of men. 

Let the good citizen perform the duties 
put on him here and now. It is not pos- 
sible to extricate yourself from the ques- 
tions in which your age is involved. It is 
net by heads reverted to the dying Demos- 
thenes, or to Luther, or to Wallace, or to 
George Fox, or to George Washington, 
that you can combat the dangers and 
dragons that beset the United States at 
this time. I believe this cannot be ac- 
complished by dunces or idlers, but re- 
quires docility, sympathy, and religious 
receiving from higher principles ; for 
liberty, like religion, is a short and hasty 
fruit, and like all power subsists only by 
new rallyings on the source of inspira- 
tion. 

Power can be generous. The very 
grandeur of the means which offer them- 
selves to us should suggest grandeur in 
the direction of our expenditure. If our 
mechanic arts are unsurpassed in useful- 
ness, if we have taught the river to make 
shoes and nails and carpets, and the bolt 
of heaven to write our letters like a 
Gillott pen, let these wonders work for 
honest humanity, for the poor, for justice, 
genius, and the public good. Let us 
realise that this country, the last found, 
is the great charity of God to the human 
race. 

America should affirm and establish 
that in no instance shall the guns go in 
advance of the present right. We shall 
not make coups d'etat and afterwards ex- 
plain and pay, but shall proceed like 
William Penn, or whatever other Chris- 
tian or humane person who treats with 


4^1 

the Indian or the foreigner, ov principles 
of honest trade and mutual advantage. 
We can see that the Constitution and the 
law in America must be written on ethi- 
cal principles, so that the entire power of 
the spiritual world shall hold the citizen 
loyal, and repel the enemy as by force of 
nature. It should be mankind’s bill of 
rights, or Royal Proclamation of the In- 
tellect ascending the throne, announcing 
its good pleasure, that now, once for all, 
the world shall be governed by common 
sense and law of morals. 

The end of all political struggle is to 
establish morality as the basis of all 
legislation. 'Tis not free institutions, 
*tis not a democracy that is the end — no, 
but only the means. Morality is the 
object of government. We want a state 
of things in which crime will not pay, a 
state of things which allows every man 
the largest liberty compatible with the 
liberty of every other man. 

Humanity asks that government shall 
not be ashamed to be tender and paternal, 
but that democratic institutions shall be 
more thoughtful for the interests of 
women, for the training of children, and 
for the welfare of sick and unable persons, 
and serious care of criminals, than was 
ever any the best government of the old 
world. 

The genius of the country has marked 
out our true policy — opportunity. Oppor- 
tunity of civil rights, of education, of 
personal power, and not less of wealth ; 
doors wide open. If I could have it — 
free trade with all the world without toll 
or custom-houses, invitation as we now 
make to every nation, to every race and 
skin, white men, red men, yellow men, 
black men ; hospitality of fair field and 
equal laws to all. Let them compete, and 
success to the strongest, the wisest, and 
the best. The land is wide enough, the 
soil has bread for all. 

I hope America will come to have its 
pride in being a nation of servants, and 
not of the served. How can men have 
any other ambition where the reason has 
not suffered a disastrous eclipse ? Whilst 
every man can say I serve — to the whole 
extent of my being I apply my faculty to 
the service of mankind in my especial 
place — he therein sees and shows a rea- 
son for his being in the world, and is not 
a moth or incumbrance in it. 

The distinction and end of a soundly 
constituted man is his labour. Use is 
inscribed on all his faculties. Use is the 
end to which he exists. As the tree exists 



492 FORTUNE OP THE REPUBLIC. 

for its fruit, so a man for his work. A west, will be present to our minds, and 
fruitless plant, an idle animal, does not our vote will be as if they voted, and we 
stand in the universe. They are all toil- shall know that our vote secures the foun- 
ing, however secretly or slowly, in the dations of the state, good-will, liberty and 
province assigned them, and to a use in security of traffic and of production, and 
the economy of the world ; the higher mutual increase of good-will in the great 
and more complex organizations, to higher interests. 

and more catholic service. A man seems Our helm is given up to a better 
to play, by his instincts and activity, a guidance than our own ; the course of 
certain part that even tells on the general events is quite too strong for any helms- 
face of the planet, drains swamps, leads man, and our little wherry is taken in tow 
rivers into dry countries for their irriga- by the ship of the great Admiral which 
tion, perforates forests and stony moun- knows the way, and has the force to draw 
tain-chains with roads, hinders the inroads men and states and planets to their good, 
of the sea on the continent, as if dressing Such and so potent is this high method 
the globe for happier races, by which the Divine Providence sends 

On the whole, I know that the cosmic the chiefest benefits under the mask of 
results will be the same, whatever the calamities, that I do not think we shall 
daily events may be. Happily we are by any perverse ingenuity prevent the 
under better guidance than of statesmen, blessing. 

Pennsylvania coal mines, and New York In seeing this guidance of events, in 
shipping, and free labour, though not seeing this felicity without example that 
idealists, gravitate in the iddal direction, has rested on the Union thus far, I find 
Nothing less large than justice can keep new confidence for the future. I could 
them in good temper. Justice satisfies heartily wish that our will and endeavour 
everybody, and justice alone. No mono- were more active parties to the work. But 
poly must be foisted in, no weak party or I see in all directions the light breaking, 
nationality sacrificed, no coward compro- Trade and government will not alone be 
mise conceded to a strong partner.