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Vol 5: The Classics
Essays and
English Traits
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
W/VA Introductions and Notes
Nolume 5
P, F. Collier & Son Corporation
NEW YORK
Copyright, 1937
By p. F. Collier & Son Corporation
Copyright, 1909
By p. F. Collier & Son
MANUFACTURED IN U. S. A.
CONTENTS
PAGE
The American Scholar 5
An Address 25
Man the Reformer 43
Self-reliance 59
Compensation 85
Friendship 105
Heroism 121
The Over-soul I33
Circles 149
The Poet 161
Character 183
Manners 199
Gifts 219
Nature 223
Politics 239
New England Reformers 253
Worship 273
Beauty 297
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Mass., on May 25, 1803,
the son of a prominent Unitarian minister. He was educated at the
Boston Latin School and at Harvard College, from which he graduated
at eighteen. On leaving college he taught school for some time, and in
1825 returned to Cambridge to study divinity. The next year he began
to preach; and in 1829 he married Ellen Tucker, and was chosen col-
league to the Rev. Henry Ware, minister of the historic church in Han-
over Street, Boston. So far things seemed to be going well with him;
but in 1831 his wife died, and in the next year scruples about administer-
ing the Lord's Supper led him to give up his church. In sadness and
poor health he set out in December on his first visit to Europe, passing
through Italy, Switzerland, and France to Britain, and visiting Landor,
Coleridge, Wordsworth, and, most important of all, Carlyle, with whom
he laid the foundation of a life-long friendship. On his return to Amer-
ica he took up lecturing, and he continued for nearly forty years to use
this form of expression for his ideas on religion, politics, literature, and
philosophy. In 1835 he bought a house in Concord, and took there his
second wife, Lidian Jackson. The history of the rest of his life is un-
eventful, as far as external incident is concerned. He traveled frequendy
giving lectures; took part in founding in 1840 the Dial, and in 1857
the Atlantic Monthly, to both of which he contributed freely, and the
former of which he edited for a short time; introduced the writings of
Carlyle to America, and published a succession of volumes of essays,
addresses, and poems. He made two more visits to Europe, and on the
earlier delivered lectures in the principal towns of England and Scodand.
He died at Concord on April 27, 1882, after a few years of failing mem-
ory, during which his public activities were necessarily gready reduced.
At the time of Emerson's death, he was recognized as the foremost
writer and thinker of his country; but this recognition had come only
gradually. The candor and the vigor of his thinking had led him often
to champion unpopular causes, and during his earlier years of author-
ship his departures from Unitarian orthodoxy were viewed with hostility
and alarm. In the Abolitionist movement also he took a prominent part,
which brought him the distinction of being mobbed in Boston and Cam-
bridge. In these and other controversies, however, while frank in his
opinions, and eloquent and vigorous in his expression of them, he
showed a remarkable quality of tact and reasonableness, which prevented
3
4 INTRODUCTORY NOTE
the opposition to him from taking the acutely personal turn which it
assumed in relation to some of his associates, and which preserved to him
a rare dignity.
Recognition of his eminence has not been confined to his countrymen.
Carlyle in Britain and Hermann Grimm in Germany were only leaders
of a large body of admirers in Europe, and it may be safely said that no
American has exerted in the Old World an intellectual influence com-
parable to that of Emerson,
The spirit and ideas which constitute the essence of his teaching are
fully expressed in the essays contained in this volume. The writings
here produced belong to the earlier half of his literary activity; but it may
fairly be said that by i860 Emerson had put forth all his important
fundamental ideas, the later utterances consisting largely of restatements
and applications of these. Thanks to the singular beauty and condensa-
tion of his style, it is thus possible to obtain from this one volume a com-
plete view of the philosophy of the greatest of American thinkers.
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR
An 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 labor. We do
not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of histories,
tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love
and poesy, like the Troubadours; nor for the advancement of science,
like our contemporaries in the British and European capitals. Thus
far our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of
the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any
more. As such, it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct.
Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be,
something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will
look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of
the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical
skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learn-
ing of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us
are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of
foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that vdll
sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead
in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames
in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star
for a thousand years?
In this hope I accept the topic which not only usage, but the
nature of our association, seem to prescribe to this day — the Amer-
ican 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 on his character and his hopes.
It is one of those fables which, out of an unknown antiquity.
O RALPH WALDO EMERSON
convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning,
divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to him-
self; 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 partially, or through
one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the
whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but
he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer,
and soldier. In the divided or social state these functions are par-
celled 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 labor to embrace all the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this
original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to mul-
titudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is
spilled into drops and cannot be gathered. The state of society is
one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk,
and strut about so many walking monsters — a good finger, a neck,
a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.
Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The
planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom
cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his
bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer,
instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an
ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft,
and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the
attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope
of a ship.
In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated intel-
lect. 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, in-
deed, every man a student, and do not all things exist for the stu-
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 7
dent's behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar the only true
master? But the old oracle said, "All things have two handles: be-
ware 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 reference to the main influences he receives.
I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences
upon the mind is that of Nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sun-
set. 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 all 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 con-
tinuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into
itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose
ending, he never can find, — so entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her
splendors shine, system on system shooting like rays upward, down-
ward, without centre, without circumference, — in the mass and in the
particle. Nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind.
Classification begins. To the young mind, everything is individual,
stands by itself. By and by it finds how to join two things, and see in
them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so tyrannized
over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, di-
minishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground,
whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one
stem. It presently learns that since the dawn of history there has been
a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classifi-
cation but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are
not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind?
The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the
human mind, is the measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds
proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is
nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote
parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one
after another reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to
their class and their law, and goes on forever to animate the last
fibre of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is
suggested that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is
flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that
Root? Is not that the soul of his soul? A thought too bold, a dream
too wild. Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of
more earthly natures, when he has learned to worship the soul, and
to see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first grop-
ings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever-expanding
knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall see that Nature is the
opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal and
one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are
the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure
of his attainments. So much of Nature as he is ignorant of, so much
of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient pre-
cept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study Nature,"
become at last one maxim.
II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar is the
mind of the Past — in whatever form, whether of literature, of art,
of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the
influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth — learn the
amount of this influence more conveniently — by considering their
value alone.
The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received
into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new
arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into
him life; it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived
actions; it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him
business; it went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now it is quick
thought. It can stand and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it
now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from
which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.
Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone of
transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of
the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the prod-
uct be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means
make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 9
conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book
of pure thought that shall be as efficient in all respects to a remote
posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age,
it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for
the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit
this.
Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches
to the act of creation — ^the act of thought — is transferred to the
record. The poet chanting was felt to be a divine man: henceforth
the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: hence-
forward 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 perverted 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 outcry
if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it
by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who
start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own
§ight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries believing
it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which
Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only
young men in libraries when they wrote these books.
Hence, instead of Man Thinking we have the bookworm. Hence,
the book-learned class who value books as such; not as related to
Nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third
Estate 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 one end, which all means go to
effect ? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a
book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit,
and made a sateUite instead of a system. The one thing in the world,
of value, is the active soul. This every man is entided to; this every
man contains within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed,
and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters
truth, or creates. In this action it is genius; not the privilege of here
and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its
10 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
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 of light, without
periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal disservice
is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-
influence. The literature of every nation bears me witness. The
English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred
years.
Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly sub-
ordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.
Books are for the scholar's idle times. When we can read God
directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's tran-
scripts 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 lamps 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-tree,
looking on a fig-tree, becometh fruitful."
It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the
best books. They impress us 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
modern joy, — with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused
by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There is some awe
mixed with the joy of our surprise when this poet, who lived in
some past world two or three hundred years ago, says that which
lies close to my own soul, that which I also had well-nigh thought
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR II
and said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical
doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should suppose some pre-
established harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and
some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact ob-
served in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub
they shall never see.
I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration
of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know that as the human
body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass
and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any
knowledge. And great and heroic men have existed who had almost
no other information than by the printed page. I only would say,
that it needs a strong head to bear that diet. One must be an in-
ventor to read well. As the proverb says, "He that would bring
home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the
Indies." There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of 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 discern-
ing will read, in his Plato or Shakspeare, 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 Shakspeare's.
Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a
wise man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious
reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office, —
to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us when they aim
not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of
various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated
fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge
are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns,
and pecuniary foundations, 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 importance, whilst
they grow richer every year.
12 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
III. There goes in the world a notion that the scholar should be
a recluse, a valetudinarian, — as unfit for any handiwork or public
labor, as a pen-knife 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 disfranchised; 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 subordinate, but
it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought
can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye
as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is
cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind.
The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes
from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do
I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded
with life, and whose not.
The world — this shadow of the soul, or other me — lies wide
around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and
make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding
tumult. I grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in
the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an instinct, that so shall
the dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate
its fear; I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So
much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilder-
ness have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my
being, my dominion. I do not see how any man can afford, for the
sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he
can partake. It is pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery,
calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wis-
dom. The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed
by, as a loss of power.
It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splen-
did products. A strange process too, this, by which experience is con-
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 1 3
verted 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 mat-
ters of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air.
Not so with our recent actions, — with the business which we now
have in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our
affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or know it,
than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The
new deed is yet a part of life, — remains for a time immersed in our
unconscious life. In some contemplative hour it detaches itself from
the life like a ripe fruit, to become a thought 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
neighborhood. Observe, too, the impossibility of antedating this act.
In its grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. But
suddenly, without observation, the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful
wings, and is an angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, no event, in
our private history which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive,
inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the
empyrean. Cradle and infancy, school and playground, 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, profession 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 return of wisdom. I will not shut myself out of this
globe of action, and transplant an oak into a flower-pot, there to
hunger and pine; nor trust the revenue of some single faculty, and
exhaust one vein of thought, much like those Savoyards, who, get-
ting their livelihood by carving shepherds, shepherdesses, and smok-
ing Dutchmen for all Europe, went out one day to the mountain to
find stock, and discovered that they had whittled up the last of their
pine-trees. Authors we have in numbers who have written out their
vein, and who, moved by a commendable prudence, sail for Greece
or Palestine, follow the trapper into the prairie, or ramble round
Algiers, to replenish their merchantable stock.
14 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of
action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors;
in town, in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank inter-
course with many men and women; in science; in art, — to the one
end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate
and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker
how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor
of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get
tiles and cope-stones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to
learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which
the field and the workyard made.
But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than
books, is, that it is a resource. That great principle of Undulation
in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the
breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day
and night; in heat and cold; and as yet more deeply ingrained in
every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of
Polarity, — these "fits of easy transmission and reflection," as Newton
called them, are the law of Nature because they are the law of
spirit.
The mind now thinks, now acts; and each fit reproduces the other.
When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no
longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended, and books
are a weariness, — he has always the resource to live. Character is
higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the func-
tionary. 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 affec-
tion cheer his lowly roof. Those "far from fame," who dwell and
act with him, will feel the force of his constitution in the doings
and passages of the day better than it can be measured by any public
and designed display. Time shall teach him that the scholar loses
no hour which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the sacred germ
of his instinct, screened from influence. What is lost in seemliness
is gained in strength. Not out of those, on whom systems of educa-
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 1$
tion have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy
the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature,
out of terrible Druids and berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shak-
speare.
I hear, therefore, with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the
dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in
the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands.
And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work;
only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake
of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments
and modes of action.
I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by Nature, by
books, and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties.
They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be com-
prised in self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and
to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies
the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed
and Herschel, in their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars
with the praise of all men, and, the results being splendid and useful,
honor is sure. But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure
and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has
thought of as such, — watching days and months, sometimes, for a
few facts; correcting still his old records, — must relinquish display
and immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation he must
betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring
the disdain of the able, who shoulder him aside. Long he must
stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse
yet, he must accept — how often! — poverty and solitude. For the
ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions,
the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making
his own, and, of course, the self -accusation, the faint heart, the fre-
quent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tan-
ghng vines in the way of the self -relying and self -directed; and th6
state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and
especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what
off -set ? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions
1 6 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
of human nature. He is one who raises himself from private con-
siderations, and breathes and Uves on pubhc and illustrious thoughts.
He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart. He is to resist the
vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving
and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious
verse, and the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human
heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its com-
mentary on the world of actions, — these he shall receive and impart.
And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pro-
nounces 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 appear-
ance. 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. 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 honorable of the earth affirm it to be the
crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let
him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of
neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time, — happy enough
if he can satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something
truly. Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure
that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns
that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has de-
scended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has
mastered any law in his private thoughts is master to that extent
of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language
his own can be translated. The poet, in utter solitude remembering
his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have
recorded that which men in crowded cities find true for them also.
The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, —
his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, — until he finds
that he is the complement of his hearers; that they drink his words
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 1 7
because he fulfils for them their own nature; the deeper he dives
into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds this
is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true. The people
dehght in it; the better part of every man feels, This is my music;
this is myself.
In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the
scholar be, — free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom,
"without any hindrance that does not arise out of his own consti-
tution." 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 presumption that, like children and women, his is a pro-
tected class; or if he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of
his thoughts from politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like
an ostrich in the flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, and
turning rhymes, as a boy whisdes to keep his courage up. So is
the danger a danger still; so is the fear worse. Manlike let him
turn and face it. Let him look into its eye and search its nature,
inspect its origin, — see the whelping of this lion, which lies no great
way back; he will then find in himself a perfect comprehension of
its nature and extent; he will have made his hands meet on the other
side, and can henceforth defy it, and pass on superior. The world
is his, who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what
stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only
by sufferance, — by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have
already dealt it its mortal blow.
Yes, we are the cowed — we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion
that we are come late into Nature; that the world was finished a
long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of
God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it.
To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they
may; but in proportion as a man has anything in him divine, the
firmament flows before him and takes his 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 color of their
present thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men by the
cheerful serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing which
1 8 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
they do is the apple which the ages have desired to pluck, now at
last ripe, and inviting nations to the harvest. The great man makes
the great thing. Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the
table. Linnxus 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 him-
self. He has almost lost the Hght that can lead him back to his
prerogatives. Men are become of no account. Men in history, men
in the world of to-day are bugs, are spawn, and are called "the mass"
and "the herd." In a century, in a millennium, one or two men;
that is to say, one or two approximations to the right state of every
man. All the rest behold in the hero or the poet their own green
and crude being, — ripened; yes, and are content to be less, so that
may attain to its full stature. What a testimony, full of grandeur,
full of pity, is borne to the demands of his own nature by the poor
clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his chief.
The poor and the low find some amends to their immense moral
capacity for their acquiescence in a political and social inferiority.
They are content to be brushed like flies from the path of a great
person, so that justice shall be done by him to that common nature
which it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified.
They sun themselves in the great man's light, and feel it to be their
own element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod
selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop
of blood to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews combat
and conquer. He lives for us, and we live in him.
Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and
power because it is as good as money, — the "spoils," so called, "of
office." And why not? for they aspire to the highest, and this, in
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 1 9
their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them, and they
shall quit the false good, and leap to the true, and leave governments
to clerks and desks. This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual
domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the
world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are
the materials strewn along the ground. The private life of one
man shall be a more illustrious monarchy, — more formidable to its
enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any
kingdom in history. For a man, righdy 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,
waxing greater by all these supplies, we crave a better and more
abundant food. The man has never Uved 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, illumi-
nates 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 individuals, I do not much
dwell on these differences. In fact, I believe each individual passes
through all three. The boy is a Greek; the youth, romantic; the
adult, reflective. I deny not, however, that a revolution in the
leading idea may be distinctly enough traced.
20 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that needs
be evil? We, 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 is 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 can
swim. If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it
not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by
side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men
are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the
old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what
to do with it.
I read with 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 the same movement which
afifected the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the
state, assumed in literature a very marked and as benign an aspect.
Instead of the subhme and beautiful; the near, the low, the common,
was explored and poetized. That which had been negligently trod-
den under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning
themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found
to be richer than all foreign parts. The literature of the poor, the
feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of
household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is
a sign, is it not ? of new vigor, when the extremities are made active,
when currents of warm life run into the hands and feet. I ask not
for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or
Arabia; what is Greek art or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 21
common, I explore and sit at the feet of the famiUar, the low. Give
me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future
worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal
in the firkin, the milk in the pan, the ballad in the street, the news
of the boat, the glance of the eye, the form and the gait of the
body, — show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the
sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it
does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see
every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an
eternal law; 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, Cowper,
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 sur-
prised 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 philos-
ophy of life, whose literary value has never yet been rightly esti-
mated; I mean Emanuel Swedenborg. The most imaginative of
men, yet writing with the precision of a mathematician, he endeav-
ored to engraft a purely philosophical Ethics on the popular Chris-
tianity of his time. Such an attempt, of course, must have difficulty
which no genius could surmount. But he saw and showed the
connection between nature and the affections of the soul. He pierced
the emblematic or spiritual character of the visible, audible, tangible
world. Especially did his shade-loving muse hover over and inter-
pret the lower parts of nature; he showed the mysterious bond that
allies moral evil to the foul material forms, and has given in epical
22 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
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. Every-
thing that tends to insulate the individual — to surround him with
barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is
his and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sover-
eign 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 a university of knowl-
edges. 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 Gendemen,
this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all
motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar.
We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The
spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid,
imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe
thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See
already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught
to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any
but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest
promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain
winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not
in unison with these, but are hindered from action by the disgust
which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and
turn drudges or die of disgust — some of them suicides. What is the
remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as
hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see,
that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts,
and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Padence,
patience; with the shades of all the good and great for company;
and for solace, the perspective of your own infinite life; and for
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 23
work, the study and the communication of principles, the making
those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the
chief disgrace in the world not to be a unit, not to be reckoned
one character, not to yield that peculiar fruit; which each man was
created to bear; but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or
the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and
our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south?
Not so, brothers and friends, — please God, ours shall not be so. We
will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we
will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer
a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread
of man and the love of man shall be a wall of 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 men.
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 dravv^ the
breath o£ life. The grass grows, the 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. The
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 planters, the mechanics,
the inventors, the astronomers, the builders of cities and the captains,
history delights to honor.
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 illustration and fable of this mind. What
am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-
kindled, but never to be quenched. Behold these outrunning laws,
which our imperfect apprehension can see tend this way and that,
but not come full circle. Behold these infinite relations, so like, so
25
26 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
unlike; many, yet one. I would study, I would know, I would
admire forever. These works of thought have been the entertain-
ments 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 with-
out 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
of that grand word, though his analysis fails entirely to render
account of it. When in innocency, or when by intellectual per-
ception, he attains to say: — "I love the Right; Truth is beautiful
within and without forevermore. 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 an-
swered, and God is well pleased.
The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence
of certain divine laws. It perceives that this homely game of life we
play, covers, under what seem foolish details, principles that astonish.
The child amidst his baubles is learning the action of light, modon,
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 traits which are all globed into every virtuous
act and thought, — in speech, we must sever, and describe or suggest
by painful enumeration of many particulars. Yet, as this sentiment
is the essence of all religion, let me guide your eye to the precise
objects of the sentiment, by an enumeration of some of those classes
of facts in which this element is conspicuous.
The intuidon of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfecdon
of the laws of the 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 ennobled. He
who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who
ADDRESS TO DIVINITY STUDENTS 27
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 immortaUty of
God, the majesty of God, do enter into that man with justice. If a
man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of ac-
quaintance with his own being. A man in the view of absolute good-
ness adores with total humility. Every step so downward is a step
upward. The man who renounces himself comes to himself.
See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, righting
wrongs, correcting appearances, and bringing up facts to a harmony
with thoughts. Its operation 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, dispensing good to his goodness, and evil to his sin. Char-
acter 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 favorable appearance — will instantly vitiate the effect.
But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with
unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive or
brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there
do seem to stir and move to bear you witness. See again the per-
fection of the Law as it applies itself to the affections, and becomes
the law of society. As we are, so we associate. 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 positive. Evil is merely privative, not
absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is
so much death or nonentity. 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 receives different names on the several shores which it washes.
All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire
28 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
with it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he 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 awakens in the mind a senti-
ment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our
highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to com-
mand. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world. It is
myrrh and storax, and chlorine 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 intransitive in things, and find no end
or unity; but the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart gives
and is the assurance 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 man.
It makes him illimitable. Through it the soul first knows itself. It
corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks to be great
by following the great, and hopes to derive advantages from another,
by showing the fountain of all good to be in himself, and that he,
equally with every man, is an inlet into the deeps of Reason. When
he says, "I ought;" when love warns him; when he chooses, warned
from on high, the good and the great deed, — then deep melodies
wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom. Then he can
worship, and be enlarged by his worship; for he 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 superstition, 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 expressions of this sentiment affect us more
than all other compositions. The sentences 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 contemplative
ADDRESS TO DIVINITY STUDENTS 29
East; not alone in Palestine, where it reached its purest expression,
but in Egypt, in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed
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 the subtle virtue
of this infusion.
Meantime, whilst the doors of the temple stand open, night and
day, before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it
is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely, it is an intuition. It
cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruc-
tion, 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 contrary, 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, Ufe. 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 doctrine of it suffers this perversion, that
the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to
all the rest, and denied with fury. The doctrine of inspiration 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 nearsighted, and can only attend
to what addresses the senses.
These general views, which, whilst they are general, none will
contest, find abundant illustration in the history of religion, and
especially in the history of the Christian church. In that, all of us
have had our birth and nurture. The truth contained 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
30 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
interest for us. Of its blessed words, which have been the consolation
of humanity, you need not that I should speak. I shall endeavor 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 now taken.
Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw wdth
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 was in you and me. He saw that God incarnates
himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of
his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion: — "I am di-
vine. 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 distortion 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 Understanding.
The understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and
said, in 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 figures 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. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man's life
was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this 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 the falling rain.
He felt respect for Moses and the prophets; but no unfit tender-
ness at postponing 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 it to be commanded. Boldly, with hand, and heart, and
life, he declared it was God. Thus is he, as I think, the only soul
in history who has appreciated the worth 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
ADDRESS TO DIVINITY STUDENTS 3 1
error that corrupts all attempts 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 positive, the
ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the
person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites every man
to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no prefer-
ences 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 admira-
tion and love, but are now petrified into official titles, kills all gen-
erous sympathy and liking. All who hear me, feel that the language
that describes Christ to Europe and America is not the style of
friendship and enthusiasm to a good and noble heart, but is appro-
priated and formal, — paints a demigod, as the Orientals or the
Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo. Accept the injurious impo-
sitions of our early catechetical instruction, and even honesty and
self-denial were but splendid 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 Uve
after the infinite Law that is in you, and in company with the in-
finite 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 forever.
The divine bards are the friends of my virtue, of my intellect, of
32 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
my strength. They admonish me that the gleams which flash across
my mind are not mine, but God's; that they had the hke, and were
not disobedient to the heavenly vision. So I love them. Noble prov-
ocations 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 some-
what of myself. The time is coming when all men will see that the
gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting, overpowering, excluding
sanctity, but a sweet, natural goodness, a goodness 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
Jesus than 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 Epami-
nondas or Washington; when I see among my contemporaries 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 my 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 insulation and peculi-
arity. 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 mind 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
ADDRESS TO DIVINITY STUDENTS 33
if God were dead. The injury to faith throttles the preacher, and the
goodliest 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
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; sometimes with chisel on stone; sometimes in
towers and aisles of granite his soul's worship is builded; sometimes
in anthems of indefinite music; but clearest and most permanent,
in words.
The man enamored of this excellency becomes its priest or poet.
The office is coeval with the world. But observe the condition, the
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 open his door to these angels, and they shall bring him the gift
of tongues. But 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 in 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 you, 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.
It is time that this ill-suppressed murmur of all thoughtful men
against the famine of our churches; this moaning of the heart be-
cause it is bereaved of the consolation, the hope, the grandeur, that
34 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
come alone out of the culture 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. Preach-
ing is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the
duties of life. In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell
me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite 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? Where 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 august 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 its power to charm and command the soul, as
the laws of nature control the acdvity of the hands, — so commanding
that we find pleasure and honor in obeying. The 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 splendor of nature; it is unlovely; we are glad
when it is done; we can make, we do make, even sitting in our
pews, a far better, holier, sweeter, for ourselves.
Wherever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the wor-
shipper defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as the pray-
ers 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 looking
at him, and then out of the window behind him, into the beaudful
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, or cheated, 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.
ADDRESS TO DIVINITY STUDENTS 35
Not one fact in all his experience had he yet imported into his doc-
trine. This man had ploughed and planted, and talked, and bought,
and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head
aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a
surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever Hved at all.
Not a line did he draw out of real history. The true preacher can
be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life, — hfe passed
through 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 he 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 unentertaining, that they
should prefer this thoughdess clamor. It shows that there is a com-
manding 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 sure there
is somewhat to be reached, and some word that can reach it. When
he listens to these vain words, he comforts himself by their relation
to his remembrance 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 indifferent nutriment. There is poetic
truth concealed in all the common-places of prayer and of sermons,
and though foolishly 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 excellency made it remem-
bered. The prayers and even the dogmas of our church are like the
zodiac of Denderah, and the astronomical monuments of the Hin-
doos, 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 rehgious
service gives rise to quite other thoughts and emotions. We need
not chide the negUgent servant. We are struck with pity, rather,
at the swift retribution of his sloth. Alas for the unhappy man that
36 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
is called to stand in the pulpit, and not give bread of life! Every-
thing that befalls, accuses him. Would he ask contributions for the
missions, 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 he urge people to a godly way of living;
and can he ask a fellow-creature to come to Sabbath 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 hollo\/, 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 blasphemer
sees fear 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 honor the purity and strict con-
science 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 with
too great tenderness the tenet of the elders, have not accepted from
others, but from their own heart, the genuine impulses of virtue,
and so still command our love and awe, to the sanctity of character.
Moreover, the exceptions are not so 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 whatever
exception, it is still true that tradition 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 necessary
and eternal; that thus historical Christianity destroys the power of
preaching, by withdrawing it from the exploration 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
behowled, and not a trait, not a word of it articulated. The pulpit
ADDRESS TO DIVINITY STUDENTS 37
in losing 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 does any man dare to be wise and good,
and so draw after him the tears and blessings of his kind.
Certainly there have been periods when, from the inactivity of
the intellect on certain truths, a greater faith was possible in names
and persons. The Puritans 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 free-
dom. 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 pubUc 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, neighborhoods,
half parishes are signing off, — to use the local term. It is already
beginning to indicate character and religion to withdraw from the
reUgious meetings. 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 circumstance,
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 decay-
ing 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 honor.
Society lives to trifles, and when men die we do not mention
them.
And now, my brothers, you will ask, What in these desponding
38 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
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 comes, all books are legible, all things
transparent, all religions are forms. He is religious. Man is the
wonderworker. He is seen amid miracles. All men bless and curse.
He saith yea and nay, only. The stationariness of reUgion; the
assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is
closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing
him as a man, — indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of
our theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God
is, not was; that He 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 and 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. See how nations and races flit by on the
sea of time, and 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
Zoroaster reverend forever. None essayeth 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 imagination of men,
and dare to love God without mediator 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.
ADDRESS TO DIVINITY STUDENTS 39
The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor
did it, because it was natural to him, and 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 periodically all families and each family in
your parish connection, — when you meet one of these men or women,
be to them a divine man; be to them thought or virtue; 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 won-
dered. By trusting your own heart, you shall gain more confidence
in other men. For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying
slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have subhme
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 in the memory the few interviews we have
had, in the dreary years of routine and of sin, with souls that made
our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told us what we
knew; that gave us leave to 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 common degrees of merit. Can
we not leave to such as love it the virtue that glitters for the com-
mendation of society, and ourselves pierce the deep solitudes of
absolute abihty 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 conversing with God wiU be to put them away. There
are persons who are not actors, not speakers, but influences; persons
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.
40 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The orators, the poets, the commanders encroach on us only as fair
women do, by our allowance and homage. Slight them by preoccu-
pation of mind, slight them as you can well afford to do, by high
and universal aims, and they instantly feel that you have 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
gradations of intelligence in the compositions we call wiser and
wisest.
In such high communion let us study the grand strokes of recti-
tude: a bold benevolence, an independence of friends so that not the
unjust wishes of those who love us will impair our freedom, but
we 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 sohdity 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, when they appear, are the Imperial Guard of Virtue, the
perpetual reserve, the dictators of fortune. One needs not praise
their courage, — they are the heart and soul of nature. Oh 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
faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension, 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 unweariable
endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of question, and
the angel is shown. But these are heights that we can scarce
remember and look up to, without contrition and shame. Let us
thank God that such things exist.
And now let us do what we can to rekindle the smouldering, nigh
ADDRESS TO DIVINITY STUDENTS 4 1
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 in vain. Faith makes us, and not we it, and faith
makes its own forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as cold
as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of
Reason, — to-day, pasteboard and fiHgree, and ending to-morrow in
madness, and murder. Rather let the breath of new life be breathed
by you through the forms already existing. For, if once you are
alive, you shall find they shall become plastic and new. The remedy
to their deformity is, first. Soul, and second. Soul, and evermore,
Soul. A whole popedom of forms one pulsation of virtue can upUft
and vivify.
Two inestimable advantages Christianity has given us: first, the
Sabbath, the jubilee of the whole world; whose light dawns welcome
aUke into the closet of the philosopher, into the garret of toil, and
into prison cells, and everywhere suggests, even to the vile, the dig-
nity of spiritual being. Let it stand forevermore a temple, which
new love, new faith, new sight shall restore to more than its first
splendor to mankind. And secondly, the institution of preaching, —
the speech of man to men, — essentially the most flexible of all or-
gans, of all forms. What hinders that now, everywhere, in pulpits,
in lecture-rooms, in houses, in fields, wherever the invitation of men
or your own occasions lead you, you spoke 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 Hebrews, and
through their lips spoke oracles 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 fragmentary; 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 the 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.
MATsT 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
and in dim traditions; that prophets and poets, that beautiful and
perfect men, we are not now, no, nor have ever seen such; that
some sources of human instruction are almost unnamed and un-
known 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, timidities, and limita-
tions, 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 foot-
man 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 in the earth, and not only
go honorably himself, but make it easier for all who follow him to
go in honor 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,
43
44 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Quakers, Knox, Wesley, Swedenborg, Bentham, in their accusations
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, schools,
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 extravagance 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 establish 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 institutions of a hundred
cities, are built on other foundations. The demon of reform has a
secret door into the heart of every lawmaker, 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 stand-
ing on the door-step to tell you the same. There is not the most
bronzed and sharpened money-catcher who does not, to your con-
sternation, almost quail and shake 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
hesitated to utter because you would laugh, — the broker, the at-
torney, the market-man, are saying the same thing. Had I waited
a day longer to speak, I had been too late. Behold, State Street
thinks, and Wall Street doubts, and begins to prophesy!"
It cannot be wondered at that this general inquest into abuses
MAN THE REFORMER 45
should arise in the bosom of society, when one considers 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 bor-
ders) 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 vigor and resources than can bp
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 grow in; and if he
would thrive in them, he must sacrifice all the brilliant dreams of
boyhood and youth as dreams, he must forget the prayers of his
childhood, and must take on him the harness of routine and ob-
sequiousness. 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. We are all implicated, of course, in this charge; it is only
necessary to ask a few questions as to the progress of the articles
of commerce 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 consump-
tion 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 fraudulently 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 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 inquire into the oppression of the sailors; I will not pry
into the usages of our retail trade. I content myself with the fact
that the general system of our trade (apart from the blacker traits.
46 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
which, I hope, are exceptions denounced and unshared by all repu-
table men) is a system of selfishness, is not dictated by the high
sentiments o£ human nature, is not measured 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 briUiant result,
and atoning for the manner of acquiring by the manner of expend-
ing it. I do not charge the merchant or the manufacturer. The
sins of our trade belong to no class, to no individual. One plucks,
one distributes, one eats. Everybody 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 irrepressible 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. Such
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 professions and
practices of man. Each has its own wrongs. Each finds a tender
and very intelligent conscience a disqualification for success. Each
requires of the practitioner a certain shutting of the eyes, a certain
dapperness and compliance, an acceptance of customs, a sequestra-
tion from the sentiments of generosity and love, a compromise of
private opinion and lofty integrity. Nay, the evil custom reaches
into the whole institution of property, until our laws which estabUsh
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, but with the conscience and love of an angel,
and he is to get his living in the world; he finds himself excluded
from all lucrative works; he has no farm, and he cannot get one;
for to earn money enough to buy one requires a sort of concentra-
MAN THE REFORMER 47
tion toward 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 tide to yours, is at once vidated. Inextricable
seem to be the twinings and tendrils of this evil, and we all involve
ourselves in it the deeper by forming connections, by wives and
children, by benefits and debts.
Consideradons of this kind have turned the attention of many
philanthropic and intelligent persons to the claims of manual labor
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 whatever is dishonest
and unclean, to take each of us bravely his part, with his own
hands, in the manual labor of the world.
But it is said: — "What! will you give up the immense advantages
reaped from the division of labor, and set every man to make his
own shoes, bureau, knife, wagon, sails, and needle? This would
be to put men back into barbarism by their own act." I see no
instant prospect of a virtuous revolution; yet I confess I should
not be pained at a change which threatened a loss of some of the
luxuries or conveniences of society, if it proceeded from a preference
of the agricultural life out of the behef that our primary duties
as men could be better discharged in that calUng. Who could
regret to see a high conscience and a purer taste exercising a sensible
effect on young men in their choice of occupation, and thinning
the ranks of competition in the labors 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 institutions, their
abuses will be redressed, and the way will be open again to the.
advantages which arise from the division of labor, and a man may
select the fittest employment for his pecuUar talent again, without
compromise.
But quite apart from the emphasis which the times give to the
48 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
doctrine that the manual labor 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 labor 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 accomplishments, 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 labor
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 myself all
this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with
my own hands. But not only health, but education, 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 check in favor of John Smith
and Co., traders, get the fair share of exercise to my faculties by
that act, which Nature intended for me in making all these far-
fetched matters important to my comfort? It is Smith himself, and
his carriers, and dealers, and manufacturers, it is the sailor, the
hidedrogher, the butcher, the negro, the hunter, and the planter
who have intercepted 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 faculties; then
should I be sure of my hands and feet, but now I feel some shame
before 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 o£
MAN THE REFORMER 49
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 suppHes 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 collected 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! Instead of
the masterly good humor, and sense of power, and fertility of re-
source in himself; 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 women-servants from the earth and the sky, and
who, bred to depend on all these, is made anxious by all that en-
dangers 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 enlarge-
ment of his knowledge, to the serving of his country, to the indul-,
gence 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
50 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
of man over his necessities, his march to the dominion of the world.
Every man ought to have this opportunity to conquer the w^orid
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 wit and might extricated themselves and
made man victorious.
I do not wish to overstate this doctrine of labor, or insist that
every man should be a farmer, any more than that every man should
be a lexicographer. In general, one may say that the husbandman's
is the oldest and most universal profession, and that where a man
does not yet discover in himself any fitness for one work more than
another, this may be preferred. But the doctrine of the farm 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
suffer the accident of his having a purse in his pocket, or his having
been bred to some dishonorable and injurious craft, to sever him
from those duties; and for this reason, that labor is God's education;
that he only is a sincere learner, he only can become a master, who
learns the secrets of labor, and who by real cunning extorts from
Nature its sceptre.
Neither would I shut my ears to the plea of the learned pro-
fessions, of the poet, the priest, the law-giver, and men of study
generally; namely, that in the experience of all men of that class,
the amount of manual labor which is necessary to the maintenance
of a family, indisposes and disqualifies for intellectual exertion. I
know it often, perhaps usually, happens, that where there is a fine
organization apt for poetry and philosophy, 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 pair
of eyes in man, and it is requisite that the pair which are beneath
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 labor can
MAN THE REFORMER 5 1
be without some loss of power and of truth to the seer himself; that,
I doubt not, the faults and vices of our Hterature 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 find in himself any strong bias
to poetry, to art, to the contemplative life, drawing him to these
things with a devotion incompatible with good husbandry, that man
ought to reckon early with himself, and, respecting the compensa-
tions of the Universe, ought to ransom himself from the duties of
economy by a certain rigor 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 conveniences of housekeep-
ing, and large hospitaUty, and the possession of works of art. Let him
feel that genius is a hospitality, and that he who can create works
of art needs not collect them. He must Hve in a chamber, and post-
pone his self-indulgence, 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 hving. Is
our housekeeping sacred and honorable? Does it raise and inspire
us, or does it cripple us instead? I' ought to be armed by every part
and function of my household, 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
52 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
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 amusement? Only for want of thought. Give his mind a new
image, and he flees into a solitary 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 Lacedsmon, 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. Expense will be inventive and heroic. We shall
eat hard and lie hard; we shall dwell like the ancient Romans in
narrow tenements, whilst our public edifices, like theirs, will be
worthy for their proportion 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 honestly?
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 meaning 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
MAN THE REFORMER 53
the lowest mission of knowledge or goodwill, is frugality for gods
and heroes.
Can we not learn the lesson of self-help? Society is full of infirm
people, who incessantly summon others to serve them. They con-
trive everywhere to exhaust for their single comfort the entire means
and appliances of that luxury to which our invention has yet at-
tained. Sofas, ottomans, stoves, wine, game-fowl, spices, perfumes,
rides, the theatre, entertainments, — 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 perceive 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 serve 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 served; inelegant perhaps it may look to-day, and to a few,
but it is 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
extravagant mark that shall compel me to suicide, or to an absolute
isolation from the advantages of civil society. If we suddenly plant
our foot, and say, I will neither eat nor drink nor wear nor touch
any food or fabric which I do not know to be innocent, or deal
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 common 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
54 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
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 remaker of what man has made;
a renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good, 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 everything which is not true to him, and put all his prac-
tices back on their first thoughts, and do nothing for which he has
not the whole world for his reason. If there are inconveniences, 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 regulator in all efforts of
reform, is the conviction that there is an infinite worthiness in man
which will appear at the call of worth, and that all particular reforms
are the removing of some impediment. Is it not the highest duty
that man should be honored in us? I ought not to allow 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 appli-
cation to Boston in 1841. The Americans have no faith. They rely
MAN THE REFORMER 55
on the power of a 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
conscientious 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
generation of unbelievers, and what a house of cards their institu-
tions 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 perceive 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 atmos-
phere, rivers, and forests, by means of the best carpenters' or en-
gineers' tools, with chemist's laboratory and smith's forge to boot,
— so neither can we ever construct that heavenly 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 after
Mahomet, who, in a few 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 miser-
ably equipped, miserably fed. They were temperance troops. There
was neither brandy nor flesh needed to feed them. They conquered
Asia, and Africa, and Spain, on barley. The CaUph 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 often-
times 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
56 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
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 acceptance of the sentiment
of love throughout Christendom for a season would bring the felon
and the outcast to our side in tears, with the devotion of his facul-
ties to our service. See this wide society of laboring 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 foundation of the world. See, this tree always bears one fruit.
In every household the peace of a pair is poisoned by the malice,
slyness, indolence, and alienation of domestics. 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 laborers, 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
designing 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 de-
press 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.
MAN THE REFORMER 57
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 proceed from the con-
cession of the rich, not from the grasping of the poor. Let us begin
by habitual 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 be 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 ac-
complish that by imperceptible methods — being its own lever, ful-
crum, and power — which force could never achieve. Have you not
seen in the woods, in a late autumn morning, a poor fungus or
mushroom, — a plant without any solidity, nay, that seemed nothing
but a soft mush or jelly, — by its constant, total, and inconceivably
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 instances,
with signal success. This great, overgrown, dead Christendom of
ours still keeps alive at least the name of a lover of mankind. But
one day all men will be lovers; and every calamity will be dissolved
in the universal sunshine.
Will you suffer me to add one trait more to this portrait of man
the reformer? The meditator between the spiritual and the actual
world should have a great prospective prudence. An Arabian poet
describes 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
58 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
irregular and interrupted impulses o£ virtue, but a continent, persist-
ing, 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 it should be concentrated into ecstasies, full of
danger and followed by reactions. There is a subhme 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 al- .
ways the present hour to the whole life; postpones 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 very wiUing
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 best means and
skill of procuring a present success, their power and their fame, to
cast all things behind, in the insatiable thirst for divine communica-
tions. 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 we now
possess into means and powers, when we shall be willing to sow the j
sun and the moon for seeds. '
SELF-RELIANCE
(1841)
Ne te quaesiveris extxa.
Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfea man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
— Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune.
Cast the banding on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolfs teat.
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.
I READ the other day some verses written by an eminent painter
which were original and not conventional. Always the soul
hears an admonition in such Hnes, let the subject be what it may.
The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they
may contain. To believe yoiu- own thought, to believe that what is
true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.
Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense;
for always the inmost becomes the outmost — and our first thought is
rendered back to us by the trimipets of the Last Judgment. Familiar
as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to
Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and tradi-
tions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man
should learn to detect and watch that gleam of Hght which flashes
across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament
of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought,
because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own
rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain aUenated
majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us
59
6o RALPH WALDO EMERSON
than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression
with good-humored inflexibiUty then most when the whole cry
of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say
with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and £ek
all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own
opinion from another.
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the
conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suic'de; that he
must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though
the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can
come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground
which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is
new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do,
nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one
character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another
none. It is not without preestablished harmony, this sculpture in the
memory. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might
testify of that particular ray. Bravely let him speak the utmost syl-
lable of his confession. We but half express ourselves, and are
ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be
safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faith-
fully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by
cowards. It needs a divine man to exhibit anything divine. A man is
relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and
done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give
him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the
attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention,
no hope.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the
place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your
contemporaries, the connexion of events. Great men have always
done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age,
betraying their perception that the Eternal was stirring at their
heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their
being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind
the same transcendent destiny; and not pinched in a corner, not
cowards fleeing before a revolution, but redeemers and benefactors,
SELF-RELIANCE 6 1
pious aspirants to be noble clay under the Almighty effort let us
advance on Chaos and the Dark,
What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text in the face and
behavior of children, babes, and even brutes. That divided and rebel
mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has com-
puted the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have
not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and
when we look in their faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms
to nobody; all conform to it; so that one babe commonly makes four
or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed
youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and
charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be
put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force,
because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room
who spoke so clear and emphatic? It seems he knows how to speak
to his contemporaries. Good Heaven! it is he! it is that very lump
of bashfulness and phlegm which for weeks has done nothing but
eat when you were by, and now rolls out these words like bell-
strokes. It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries.
Bashful or bold then, he will know how to make us seniors very
unnecessary.
The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would
disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the
healthy attitude of human nature. How is a boy the master of
society; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on
such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their
merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting,
silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about con-
sequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict.
You must court him; he does not court you. But the man is as it
were clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once
acted or spoken with eclat he is a committed person, watched by the
sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now
enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could
pass again into his neutral, godlike independence! Who can thus lose
all pledge and, having observed, observe again from the same un-
affected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always
62 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
be formidable, must always engage the poet's and the man's regards.
Of such an immortal youth the force would be felt. He would utter
opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private but
necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men and put them
in fear.
These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint
and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in
conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society
is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the
better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the
liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is con-
formity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and
creators, but names and customs.
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would
gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of good-
ness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred
but the integrity of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and
you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer
which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued ad-
viser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of
the church. On my saying. What have I to do with the sacredness of
traditions, if I live wholly from within ? my friend suggested, — "But
these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied,
"They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil's child, I
will live then from the devil." No law can be sacred to me but that
of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable
to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the
only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the pres-
ence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral
but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges
and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and
well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I
ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.
If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass?
If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and
comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say
to him, "Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured
SELF-RELIANCE 63
and modest; have that grace; and never varnish your hard, unchar-
itable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a
thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home." Rough and
graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the
affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else
it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the counter-
action of the doctrine of love, when that pules and whines. I shun
father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me.
I would write on the lintels of the doorpost, Whim. I hope it is
somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in
explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I
exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-
day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are
they my poor ? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge
the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to
me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to
whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will
go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the
education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the
vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-
fold Relief Societies; — though I confess with shame I sometimes
succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by-and-by I
shall have the manhood to withhold.
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the
rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a
good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would
pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their
works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the
world, — as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues
are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an
apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much pre-
fer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal,
than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound
and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. My life should be
unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine. I ask
primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from
the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no difference
64 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent.
I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right.
Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need
for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary
testimony.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve
for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the
harder because you will always find those who think they know
what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to
live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our
own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps
with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to
you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the
impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, con-
tribute to a dead Bible Society, vote with a great party either for the
Government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, —
under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you
are. And of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper
life. But do your thing, and I shall know you. Do your work, and
you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blind-
man's-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect I antici-
pate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and
topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I
not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and
spontaneous word? Do I not know that with all this ostentation
of examining the grounds of the institution he will do no such
thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but
at one side, the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister ?
He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest
affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or
another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these
communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a
few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars.
Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two,
their four not the real four: so that every word they say chagrins us
SELF-RELIANCE 65
and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature
is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which
we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire
by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying
experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the
general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise," the forced smile
which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease, in answer
to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spon-
taneously moved but moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow
tight about the outline of the face, and make the most disagreeable
sensation; a sensation of rebuke and warning which no brave young
man will suffer twice.
For non-conformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And
therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The by-
standers look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's
parlor. If this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance
like his own he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the
sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause
— disguise no god, but are put on and ofi as the wind blows and a
newspaper directs. Yet is the discontent of the multitude more for-
midable than that of the senate and the college. It is easy enough
for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage of the culti-
vated classes. Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are
timid, as being very vulnerable themselves. But when to their fem-
inine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant
and the poor are aroused, when the uninteUigent brute force that
lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the
habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no
concernment.
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency;
a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have
no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are
loath to disappoint them.
But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why
drag about this monstrous corpse of your memory, lest you contradict
somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you
should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wis-
66 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
dom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of
pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-
eyed present, and live ever in a new day. Trust your emotion. In
your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity, yet when
the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life,
though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your
theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.
A foohsh consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by
little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a
great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern him-
self with his shadow on the wall. Out upon your guarded hps! Sew
them up with packthread, do. Else if you would be a man speak
what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-
morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though
it contradict every thing you said to-day. Ah, then, exclaim the aged
ladies, you shall be sure to be misunderstood! Misunderstood! It is
a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood ? Pythag-
oras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and
Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit
that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the salUes of his will
are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes
and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does
it matter how you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic
or Alexandrian stanza; — read it forward, backward, or across, it
still spells the same thing. In this pleasing contrite wood-Hfe which
God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without
prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmet-
rical, though I mean it not and see it not. My book should smell of
pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my
window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill
into my web also. We pass for what we are. Character teaches
above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or
vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a
breath every moment.
Fear never but you shall be consistent in whatever variety of
actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one
I
SELF-RELIANCE 67
will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem.
These varieties are lost sight of when seen at a Uttle distance, at a
httle height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage
of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. This is only
microscopic criticism. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it
straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will
explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your con-
formity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already
done singly will justify you now. Greatness always appeals to the
future. If I can be great enough now to do right and scorn eyes, I
must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it
how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances and you always
may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of
virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty
of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagina-
tion ? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind.
There they all stand and shed an united light on the advancing actor.
He is attended as by a visible escort of angels to every man's eye.
That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity
into Washington's port, and America into Adams's eye. Honor is
venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue.
We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it and pay
it homage because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is
self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate
pedigree, even if shown in a young person.
I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and con-
sistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.
Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan
fife. Let us bow and apologize never more. A great man is coming
to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him: I wish that he
should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and
though I would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront
and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of
the times, and hurl in the face of custom and trade and office, the
fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsi-
ble Thinker and Actor moving wherever moves a man; that a true
man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things.
68 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Where he is, there is nature. He measures you and all men and
all events. You are constrained to accept his standard. Ordinarily,
every body in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other
person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes
place of the whole creation. The man must be so much that he must
make all circumstances indifferent — put all means into the shade.
This all great men are and do. Every true man is a cause, a country,
and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to
accomplish his thought; — and posterity seem to follow his steps as
a procession. A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a
Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and
cleave to his genius that he is confounded with virtue and the
possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one
man; as, the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Method-
ism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called "the
height of Rome;" and all history resolves itself very easily into the
biography of a few stout and earnest persons.
Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet.
Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a
charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper in the world which exists
for him. But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself
which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a
marble god, feels poor when he looks at these. To him a palace, a
statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like
a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, 'Who are you, sir?' Yet
they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that
they will come out and take possession. The picture waits for my
verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claim to praise.
That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the
street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in
the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious
ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane — owes
its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man,
who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exer-
cises his reason and finds himself a true prince.
Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history our imagi-
nation makes fools of us, plays us false. Kingdom and lordship,
SELF-RELIANCE 69
power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and
Edward in a small house and common day's work: but the things of
life are the same to both: the sum total of both is the same. Why all
this deference to Alfred and Scanderbeg and Gustavus? Suppose
they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue? As great a stake de-
pends on your private act to-day as followed their public and re-
nowned steps. When private men shall act with original views, the
lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of
gentlemen.
The world has indeed been instructed by its kings, who have so
magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal
symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man to man. The joy-
ful loyalty with which men have everywhere suffered the king, the
noble, or the great proprietor to walk among them by a law of his
own, make his own scale of men and things and reverse theirs, pay
for benefits not with money but with honor, and represent the Law
in his person, was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified
their consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of
every man.
The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when
we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee ? What is the
aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded?
What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without
parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty
even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independ-
ence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the
essence of genius, the essence of virtue, and the essence of life, which
we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as
Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force,
the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their
common origin. For the sense of being which in calm hours rises,
we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from spacei
from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceedeth
obviously from the same source whence their life and being also pro-
ceedeth. We first share the life by which things exist and afterwards
see them as appearances in nature and forget that we have shared
their cause. Here is the fountain of action and the fountain of
70 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man
wisdom, of that inspiration of man which cannot be denied without
impiety and atheism. We He in the lap of immense intelligence,
which makes us organs of its activity and receivers of its truth.
When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of
ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this
comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes — all metaphysics, all
philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm.
Every man discerns between the voluntary acts of his mind and his
involuntary perceptions. And to his involuntary perceptions he
knows a perfect respect is due. He may err in the expression of
them, but he knows that these things are so, like day and night, not
to be disputed. All my wilful actions and acquisitions are but rov-
ing; — the most trivial reverie, the faintest native emotion, are domes-
tic and divine. Thoughtless people contradict as readily the state-
ment of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more readily; for
they do not distinguish between perception and notion. They fancy
that I choose to see this or that thing. But perception is not whim-
sical, but fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it after me, and
in course of time all mankind, — although it may chance that no one
has seen it before me. For my perception of it is as much a fact as
the sun.
The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is
profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speak-
eth he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should
fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time,
souls, from the centre of the present thought; and new date and new
create the whole. Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine
wisdom, then old things pass away, — means, teachers, texts, temples
fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour.
All things are made sacred by relation to it, — one thing as much as
another. AH things are dissolved to their centre by their cause, and
in the universal miracle petty and particular miracles disappear. This
is and must be. If therefore a man claims to know and speak of God
and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered
nation in another country, in another world, beUeve him not. Is the
acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and completion? Is
SELF-RELIANCE 7I
the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened
being? Whence then this worship of the past? The centuries are
conspirators against the sanity and majesty of the soul. Time and
space are but physiological colors which the eye maketh, but the soul
is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an
impertinence and an injury if it be any thing more than a cheerful
apologue or parable of my being and becoming.
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not
say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed
before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my
window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are
for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to
them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its
existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-
blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less.
Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike.
There is no time to it. But man postpones or remembers; he does not
live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heed-
less of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the
future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature
in the present, above time.
This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare
not yet hear God himself unless he speak the phraseology of I know
not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so
great a price on a few texts, on a few Uves. We are like children
who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as
they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to
see, — painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards,
when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered
these sayings, they understand them and are willing to let the words
go; for at any time they can use words as good when occasion comes.
So was it with us, so will it be, if we proceed. If we live truly, we
shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is
for the weak to be weak. When we have new perception, we shall
gladly disburthen the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish.
When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the mur-
mur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.
72 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid;
probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far off remember-
ing of the intuition. That thought, by what I can now nearest
approach to say it, is this. When good is near you, when you have
life in yourself, — it is not by any known or appointed way; you shall
not discern the footprints of any other; you shall not see the face of
man; you shall not hear any name; — the way, the thought, the good,
shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude all other being.
You take the way from man, not to man. All persons that ever
existed are its fugitive ministers. There shall be no fear in it. Fear
and hope are alike beneath it. It asks nothing. There is somewhat
low even in hope. We are then in vision. There is nothing that can
be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul is raised over passion.
It seeth identity and eternal causation. It is a perceiving that Truth
and Right are. Hence it becomes a Tranquillity out of the knowing
that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature; the Atlantic Ocean, the
South Sea; vast intervals of time, years, centuries, are of no account.
This which I think and feel underlay that former state of life and
circumstances, as it does underlie my present and will always all
circumstances, and what is called life and what is called death.
Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant
of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a
new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This
one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that forever
degrades the past; turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a
shame; confounds the saint with the rogue; shoves Jesus and Judas
equally aside. Why then do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as
the soul is present there will be power not confident but agent. To
talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of
that which relies because it works and is. Who has more soul than
I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I
must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. Who has less I rule with
like facility. We fancy it rhetoric when we speak of eminent virtue.
We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a com-
pany of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature
must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets,
who are not.
SELF-RELIANCE 73
This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as
on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed One. Virtue
is the governor, the creator, the reality. All things real are so by so
much virtue as they contain. Hardship, husbandry, hunting, whal-
ing, war, eloquence, personal weight, are somewhat, and engage my
respect as examples of the soul's presence and impure action. I see
the same law working in nature for conservation and growth. The
poise of a planet, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong
wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are also
demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore self-relying soul.
All history, from its highest to its trivial passages, is the various
record of this power.
Thus all concentrates; let us not rove; let us sit at home with the
cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and
books and institutions by a simple declaration of the divine fact.
Bid them take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within.
Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own law
demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our native
riches.
But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is
the soul admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication
with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of
the urns of men. We must go alone. Isolation must precede true
society. I like the silent church before the service begins, better
than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons
look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary. So let us always
sit. Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or
father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to
have the same blood ? All men have my blood and I have all men's.
Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent
of being ashamed of it. But your isolation must not be mechanical,
but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At times the whole world
seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles.
Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once
at thy closet door and say, "Come out unto us." — Do not spill thy
soul; do not all descend; keep thy state; stay at home in thine own
heaven; come not for a moment into their facts, into their hubbub
74 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
of conflicting appearances, but let in the light of thy law on their
confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a
weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act.
"What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of
the love."
If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let
us at least resist our temptations, let us enter into the state of war and
wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts.
This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check
this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the ex-
pectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we
converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O
friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Hencefor-
ward I am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I
obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but
proximities. I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, to support my
family, to be the chaste husband of one wife, — but these relations I
must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your
customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for
you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be happier.
If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I must be
myself. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that
what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon
whatever inly rejoices me and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I
will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by
hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth
with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this
not selfishly but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and
mine, and all men's, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in
truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is
dictated by your nature as well as mine, and if we follow the truth
it will bring us out safe at last. — But so may you give these friends
pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their
sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when
they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they justify
me and do the same thing.
The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a
SELF-RELIANCE 75
rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sen-
sualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the
law of consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or
the other of which we must be shriven. You may fulfil your round
of duties by clearing yourself in the direct, or in the reflex way. Con-
sider whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother,
cousin, neighbor, town, cat and dog; whether any of these can uf>-
braid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard and absolve
me to myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It
denies the name of duty to many offices that are called duties. But if
I can discharge its debts it enables me to dispense with the popular
code. If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its com-
mandment one day.
And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast oflE
the common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself
for a task-master. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight,
that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that
a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to
others.
If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinc-
tion society, he will see the need of these ethics. The sinew and heart
of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous despond-
ing whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of
death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect
persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our
social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent; cannot satisfy
their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their
practical force, and so do lean and beg day and night continually.
Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our
marriages, our religion we have not chosen, but society has chosen
for us. We are parlor soldiers. The rugged battle of fate, where
strength is born, we shun.
If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose all
heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest
genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office
within one year afterwards, in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New
York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being
"](> RALPH WALDO EMERSON
disheartened and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad
from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the pro-
fessions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches,
edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in
successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a
hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels
no shame in not "studying a profession," for he does not postpone his
life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.
Let a stoic arise who shall reveal the resources of man and tell men
they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves;
that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a
man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations, that
he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he
acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries and customs
out of the window, — we pity him no more but thank and revere
him; — and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor and
make his name dear to all History.
It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance — a new respect for the
divinity in man — must work a revolution in all the offices and rela-
tions of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits;
their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their
speculative views.
I. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call
a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad
and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign
virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural,
and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular com-
modity — anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contem-
plation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the
soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God
pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a
private end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity
in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God,
he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer
of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower
kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout
nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach, in Fletcher's Bonduca,
SELF-RELIANCE 77
when admonished to inquire the mind of the god Audate, replies:
His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors;
Our valors are our best gods.
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the
want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities if you
can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work and
already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base.
We come to them who weep foolishly and sit down and cry for
company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough
electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with the
soul. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore
to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung
wide. Him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with
desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did
not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate
him because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation.
The gods love him because men hated him. "To the persevering
mortal," said Zoroaster, "the blessed Immortals are swift."
As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a
disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, "Let
not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us,
and we will obey." Everywhere I am bereaved of meeting God in
my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors and recites
fables merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's God. Every
new mind is a new classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon
activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a
Spurzheim, it imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a new
system. In proportion always to the depth of the thought, and so to
the number of the objects it touches and brings within reach of the
pupil, is his complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and
churches, which are also classifications of some powerful mind acting
on the great elemental thought of Duty and man's relation to the
Highest. Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgianism. The
pupil takes the same delight in subordinating every thing to the new
terminology that a girl does who has just learned botany in seeing a
new earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time that
yS RALPH WALDO EMERSON
the pupil will feel a real debt to the teacher — will find his intellectual
power has grown by the study of his writings. This will continue
until he has exhausted his master's mind. But in all unbalanced
minds the classification is idolized, passes for the end and not for a
speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to
their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe; the
luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master
built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to see —
how you can see; "It must be somehow that you stole the light from
us." They do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable,
will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile
and call it their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their
neat new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will
rot and vanish, and the immortal Hght, all young and joyful, million-
orbed, million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first
morning.
2. It is for want of self-culture that the idol of Travelling, the idol
of Italy, of England, of Egypt, remains for all educated Americans.
They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagina-
tion, did so not by rambling round creation as a moth round a lamp,
but by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In
manly hours we feel that duty is our place and that the merry men of
circumstance should follow as they may. The soul is no traveller:
the wise man stays at home with the soul, and when his necessities,
his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign
lands, he is at home still and is not gadding abroad from himself,
and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance
that he goes, the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities
and men hke a sovereign and not hke an interloper or a valet.
I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe
for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is
first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding
somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused or
to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself,
and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Pal-
myra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they.
He carries ruins to ruins.
]
SELF-RELIANCE 79
Travelling is a fool's paradise. We owe to our first journeys the
discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at
Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack
my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake
up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern Fact, the sad self, unre-
lenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces.
I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not
intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
3. But the rage of travelling is itself only a symptom of a deeper
unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect
is vagabond, and the universal system of education fosters resdess-
ness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home.
We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind?
Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished
with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our whole minds,
lean, and follow the Past and the Distant, as the eyes of a maid fol-
low her mistress. The soul created the arts wherever they have flour-
ished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It
was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and
the conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or
the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought and
quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American
artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by
him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants
of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create
a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and
sentiment will be satisfied also.
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present
every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation;
but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extempora-
neous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his
Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till
that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have
taught Shakspeare ? Where is the master who could have instructed
Frankhn, or Washington, or Bacon, or NeviT:on ? Every great man
is an unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could
not borrow. If anybody will tell me whom the great man imitates
8o RALPH WALDO EMERSON
in the original crisis when he performs a great act, I will tell him
who else than himself can teach him. Shakspeare will never be
made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned thee
and thou canst not hope too much or dare too much. There is at this
moment, there is for me an utterance bare and grand as that of the
colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of
Moses or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the
soul, all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to
repeat itself; but if I can hear what these patriarchs say, surely I can
reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue
are two organs of one nature. Dwell up there in the simple and
noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart and thou shalt reproduce the
Foreworld again.
4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does
our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement
of society, and no man improves.
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains
on the other. Its progress is only apparent like the workers of a
treadmill. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civil-
ized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not
amelioration. For every thing that is given something is taken.
Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts. What a contrast
between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a
watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked
New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an
undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under. But compare the
health of the two men and you shall see that his aboriginal strength,
the white man has lost. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage
with a broad axe and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal
as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send
the white man to his grave.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of
his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of
muscle. He has got a fine Geneva watch, but he has lost the skill to
tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and
so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the
street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not
SELF-RELIANCE 8 1
observe; the equinox he knows as Uttle; and the whole bright calen-
dar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair
his memory: his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office
increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether
machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refine-
ment some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments
and forms some vigor of wild virtue. For every stoic was a stoic; but
in Christendom where is the Christian ?
There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the
standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were.
A singular equality may be observed between the great men of the
first and of the last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and
philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men
than Plutarch's heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not
in time is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diog-
enes, are great men, but they leave no class. He who is really of
their class will not be called by their name, but be wholly his own
man, and in his turn the founder of a sect. The arts and inventions
of each period are only its costume and do not invigorate men. The
harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good. Hudson
and Behring accomplished so much in their fishing-boats as to aston-
ish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the resources
of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a more
splendid series of facts than any one since. Columbus found the New
World in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse
and perishing of means and machinery which were introduced with
loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The great genius
returns to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art
of war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon conquered
Europe by the Bivouac, which consisted of falling back on naked
valor and disencumbering it of all aids. The Emperor held it im-
possible to make a perfect army, says Las Cases, "without abolishing
our arms, magazines, commissaries and carriages, until, in imitation
of the Roman custom, the soldier should receive his supply of corn,
grind it in his hand-mill and bake his bread himself."
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of
which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from
82 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons
who make up a nation to-day, die, and their experience with them.
And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on govern-
ments which protect it, is the want of self-reUance. Men have looked
away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to
esteem what they call the soul's progress, namely, the religious,
learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they depre-
cate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on
property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has,
and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of
his property, ashamed of what he has, out of new respect for his
being. Especially he hates what he has if he sees that it is accidental,
— came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it
is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and
merely lies there because no revolution or no robber takes it away.
But that which a man is, does always by necessity acquire, and what
the man acquires, is permanent and living property, which does not
wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or
bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man is put.
"Thy lot or portion of life," said the Caliph Ali, "is seeking after
thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it." Our dependence on
these foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. The
political parties meet in numerous conventions; the greater the con-
course and with each new uproar of announcement, The delegation
from Essex! The Democrats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of
Maine! the young patriot feels himself stronger than before by a new
thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner the reformers summon
conventions and vote and resolve in multitude. But not so O friends!
will the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method pre-
cisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts off from himself all
external support and stands alone that I see him to be strong and to
prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man
better than a town ? Ask nothing of men, and, in the endless muta-
tion, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder of
all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power is in the soul,
that he is weak only because he has looked for good out of him and
elsewhere, and, so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his
SELF-RELIANCE 83
thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, com-
mands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his
feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.
So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and
gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlaw-
ful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors
of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the
wheel of Chance, and shalt always drag her after thee. A political
victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of your
absent friend, or some other quite external event raises your spirits,
and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it.
It can never be so. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Noth-
ing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
COMPENSATION
(1841)
EVER since I was a boy I have wished to write a discourse on
Compensation; for it seemed to me when very young that
on this subject Life was ahead of theology and the people
knew more than the preachers taught. The documents too from
which the doctrine is to be drawn, charmed my fancy by their
endless variety, and lay always before me, even in sleep; for they are
the tools in our hands, the bread in our basket, the transactions of
the street, the farm and the dwelling-house; the greetings, the rela-
tions, the debts and credits, the influence of character, the nature and
endowment of all men. It seemed to me also that in it might be
shown men a ray of divinity, the present action of the Soul of this
world, clean from all vestige of tradition; and so the heart of man
might be bathed by an inundation of eternal love, conversing with
that which he knows was always and always must be, because it
really is now. It appeared moreover that if this doctrine could be
stated in terms with any resemblance to those bright intuitions in
which this truth is sometimes revealed to us, it would be a star in
many dark hours and crooked passages in our journey, that would
not suffer us to lose our way.
I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon at
church. The preacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, unfolded
in the ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last Judgment. He
assumed that judgment is not executed in this world; that the wicked
are successful; that the good are miserable; and then urged from
reason and from Scripture a compensation to be made to both parties
in the next life. No offence appeared to be taken by the congregation
at this doctrine. As far as I could observe when the meeting broke
up they separated without remark on the sermon.
Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the preacher
mean by saying that the good are miserable in the present life?
85
86 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Was it that houses and lands, offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are
had by unprincipled men, whilst the saints are poor and despised;
and that a compensation is to be made to these last hereafter, by giv-
ing them the like gratifications another day, — bank-stock and dou-
bloons, venison and champagne? This must be the compensation
intended; for what else? Is it that they are to have leave to pray and
praise? to love and serve men? Why, that they can do now. The
legitimate inference the disciple would draw was, "We are to have
such a good time as the sinners have now"; — or, to push it to its
extreme import, — "You sin now, we shall sin by-and-by; we would
sin now, if we could; not being successful we expect our revenge
tomorrow."
The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are
successful; that justice is not done now. The blindness of the
preacher consisted in deferring to the base estimate of the market
of what constitutes a manly success, instead of confronting and
convicting the world from the truth; announcing the Presence of
the Soul; the omnipotence of the Will; and so establishing the
standard of good and ill, of success and falsehood, and summoning
the dead to its present tribunal.
I find a similar base tone in the popular religious works of the day
and the same doctrines assumed by the literary men when occasion-
ally they treat the related topics. I think that our popular theology
has gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the superstitions
it has displaced. But men are better than this theology. Their daily
life gives it the lie. Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the
doctrine behind him in his own experience, and all men feel some-
times the falsehood which they cannot demonstrate. For men are
wiser than they know. That which they hear in schools and pulpits
without afterthought, if said in conversation would probably be
questioned in silence. If a man dogmatize in a mixed company on
Providence and the divine laws, he is answered by a silence which
conveys well enough to an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer,
but his incapacity to make his own statement.
I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to record some
facts that indicate the path of the law of Compensation; happy
COMPENSATION 87
beyond my expectation if I shall truly draw the smallest arc of this
circle.
Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature;
in darkness and hght, in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of
waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of
plants and animals; in the systole and diastole of the heart; in the
undulations of fluids and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal
gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce
magnetism at one end of a needle, the opposite magnetism takes
place at the other end. If the south attracts, the north repels. To
empty here, you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects
nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to
make it whole; as, spirit, matter; man, woman; subjective, objective;
in, out; upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay.
Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The
entire system of things gets represented in every particle. There is
somewhat that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and night,
man and woman, in a single needle of the pine, in a kernel of corn,
in each individual of every animal tribe. The reaction, so grand in
the elements, is repeated within these small boundaries. For ex-
ample, in the animal kingdom the physiologist has observed that no
creatures are favorites, but a certain compensation balances every gift
and every defect. A surplusage given to one part is paid out of a
reduction from another part of the same creature. If the head and
neck are enlarged, the trunk and extremities are cut short.
The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What we
gain in power is lost in time, and the converse. The periodic or
compensating errors of the planets is another instance. The influ-
ences of climate and soil in political history are another. The cold
climate invigorates. The barren soil does not breed fevers, crocodiles,
tigers, or scorpions.
The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man.
Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet
hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of
pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its
moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain of
OO RALPH WALDO EMERSON
folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gained something
else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something. If riches in-
crease, they are increased that use them. If the gatherer gathers too
much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest;
swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and
exceptions. The waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a level
from their loftiest tossing than the varieties of condition tend to
equalize themselves. There is always some levelling circumstance
that puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate,
substantially on the same ground with all others. Is a man too
strong and fierce for society and by temper and position a bad citizen,
— a morose ruffian, with a dash of the pirate in him ? — nature sends
him a troop of pretty sons and daughters who are getting along in
the dame's classes at the village school, and love and fear for them
smooths his grim scowl to courtesy. Thus she contrives to intenerate
the granite and felspar, takes the boar out and puts the lamb in and
keeps her balance true.
The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the
President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost
him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve
for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he
is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind
the throne. Or do men desire the more substantial and permanent
grandeur of genius? Neither has this an immunity. He who by
force of will or of thought is great and overlooks thousands, has the
responsibility of overlooking. With every influx of light comes new
danger. Has he light ? he must bear witness to the light, and always
outrun that sympathy which gives him such keen satisfaction, by
his fidelity to new revelations of the incessant soul. He must hate
father and mother, wife and child. Has he all that the world loves
and admires and covets? — he must cast behind him their admiration
and afflict them by faithfulness to his truth and become a byword and
a hissing.
This Law writes the laws of the cities and nations. It will not be
baulked of its end in the smallest iota. It is in vain to build or plot
or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Res
nolunt dill male administrari. Though no checks to a new evil
COMPENSATION 89
appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is cruel,
the governor's life is not safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will
yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will
not convict. Nothing arbitrary, nothing artificial can endure. The
true life and satisfactions of man seem to elude the utmost rigors
or fehcities of condition and to estabHsh themselves with great
indiilerency under all varieties of circumstance. Under all govern-
ments the influence of character remains the same, — in Turkey and
New England about alike. Under the primeval despots of Egypt,
history honestly confesses that man must have been as free as culture
could make him.
These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is repre-
sented in every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains
all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuif; as
the naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards
a horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a
flying man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only
the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the
aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies and whole system of every
other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the
world and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire
emblem of human Hfe; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its
course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the
whole man and recite all his destiny.
The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope cannot
fiind the animalcule which is less perfect for being litde. Eyes, ears,
taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduction
that take hold on eternity, — all find room to consist in the small crea-
ture. So do we put our life into every act. The true doctrine of
omnipresence is diat God reappears with all his parts in every moss
and cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into
every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the
repulsion; if the force, so the limitation.
Thus is the universe ahve. All things are moral. That soul which
within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspira-
tions; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. It is almighty.
All nature feels its grasp. "It is in the world, and the world was
go RALPH WALDO EMERSON
made by it." It is eternal but it enacts itself in time and space. Jus-
tice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all
parts of life. Oi kO^ol Atos ael d) iriirTovaL. The dice of God are
always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication-table, or a
mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself.
Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still
returns to you. Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every
virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty.
What we call retribution is the universal necessity by which the
whole appears wherever a part appears. If you see smoke, there
must be fire. If you see a hand or a limb, you know that the trunk
to which it belongs is there behind.
Every act rewards itself, or in other words integrates itself, in a
twofold manner: first in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly
in the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circum-
stance the retribution. The casual retribution is in the thing and is
seen by the soul. The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the
understanding; it is inseparable from the thing, but is often spread
over a long time and so does not become distinct until after many
years. The specific stripes may follow late after the offence, but they
follow because they accompany it. Crime and punishment grow out
of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the
flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means
and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already
blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the
seed.
Whilst thus the world will be whole and refuses to be disparted,
we seek to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate; for example, — to
gratify the senses we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs
of the character. The ingenuity of man has been dedicated to the
solution of one problem, — how to detach the sensual sweet, the
sensual strong, the sensual bright, etc., from the moral sweet, the
moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off
this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a one end,
without an other end. The soul says, Eat; the body would feast. The
soul says. The man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul; the
COMPENSATION 9 1
body would join the flesh only. The soul says, Have dominion over
all things to the ends of virtue; the body would have the power over
things to its own ends.
The soul strives amain to live and work through all things. It
would be the only fact. All things shall be added unto it, — power,
pleasure, knowledge, beauty. The particular man aims to be some-
body; to set up for himself; to truck and higgle for a private good;
and, in particulars, to ride that he may ride; to dress that he may be
dressed; to eat that he may eat; and to govern, that he may be seen.
Men seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and
fame. They think that to be great is to get only one side of nature, —
the sweet, without the other side, — the bitter.
Steadily is this dividing and detaching counteracted. Up to this
day it must be owned no projector has had the smallest success. The
parted water reunites behind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of
pleasant things, profit out of profitable things, power out of strong
things, the moment we seek to separate them from the whole. We
can no more halve things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we
can get an inside that shall have no outside, or a light without a
shadow. "Drive out nature with a fork, she comes running back."
Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek
to dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know, brags
that they do not touch him; — ^but the brag is on his lips, the condi-
tions are in his soul. If he escapes them in one part they attack
him in another more vital part. If he has escaped them in form and
in the appearance, it is because he has resisted his life and fled from
himself, and the retribution is so much death. So signal is the
failure of all attempts to make this separation of the good from the
tax, that the experiment would not be tried, — since to try it is to be
mad, — but for the circumstance that when the disease began in the
will, of rebellion and separation, the intellect is at once infected, so
that the man ceases to see God whole in each object, but is able to
see the sensual allurement of an object and not see the sensual hurt;
he sees the mermaid's head but not the dragon's tail, and thinks
he can cut off that which he would have from that which he would
not have. "How secret art thou who dwellest in the highest heavens
92 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
in silence, O thou only great God, sprinkling with an unwearied
providence certain penal bUndnesses upon such as have unbridled
desires!"^
The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of fable, of
history, of law, of proverbs, of conversation. It finds a tongue in
literature unawares. Thus the Greeks called Jupiter, Supreme Mind;
but having traditionally ascribed to him many base actions, they
involuntarily made amends to Reason by tying up the hands of so
bad a god. He is made as helpless as a king of England. Prometheus
knows one secret which Jove must bargain for; Minerva, another.
He cannot get his own thunders; Minerva keeps the key of them:
Of all the gods, I only know the keys
That ope the solid doors within whose vaults
His thunders sleep.
A plain confession of the in-working of the All and of its moral aim.
The Indian mythology ends in the same ethics; and indeed it would
seem impossible for any fable to be invented and get any currency
which was not moral. Aurora forgot to ask youth for her lover,
and though so Tithonus is immortal, he is old. Achilles is not
quite invulnerable; for Thetis held him by the heel when she dipped
him in the Styx and the sacred waters did not wash that part. Sieg-
fried, in the Nibelungen, is not quite immortal, for a leaf fell on his
back whilst he was bathing in the Dragon's blood, and that spot
which it covered is mortal. And so it always is. There is a crack in
every thing God has made. Always it would seem there is this
vindictive circumstance stealing in at unawares even into the wild
poesy in which the human fancy attempted to make bold holiday
and to shake itself free of the old laws, — this back-stroke, this kick
of the gun, certifying that the law is fatal; that in nature nothing
can be given, all things are sold.
This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps watch in the
Universe and lets no offence go unchastised. The Furies they said
are attendants on Justice, and if the sun in heaven should transgress
his path they would punish him. The poets related that stone walls
and iron swords and leathern thongs had an occult sympathy with
* St. Augustine, Confessions, B. I.
COMPENSATION 93
the wrongs of their owners; that the belt which Ajax gave Hector
dragged the Trojan hero over the field at the wheels of the car of
Achilles, and the sword which Hector gave Ajax was that on whose
point Ajax fell. They recorded that when the Thasians erected a
statue to Theogenes, a victor in the games, one of his rivals went
to it by night and endeavored to throw it down by repeated blows,
until at last he moved it from its pedestal and was crushed to death
beneath its fall.
This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came from
thought above the will of the writer. That is the best part of each
writer which has nothing private in it; that is the best part of each
which he does not know; that which flowed out of his constitution
and not from his too active invention; that which in the study of a
single artist you might not easily find, but in the study of many
you would abstract as the spirit of them all. Phidias it is not, but
the work of man in that early Hellenic world that I would know.
The name and circiunstance of Phidias, however convenient for
history, embarrasses when we come to the highest criticism. We are
to see that which man was tending to do in a given period, and was
hindered, or, if you will, modified in doing, by the interfering
volitions of Phidias, of Dante, of Shakspeare, the organ whereby
man at the moment wrought.
Still more striking is the expression of this fact in the proverbs
of all nations, which are always the literature of Reason, or the
statements of an absolute truth without qualifications. Proverbs,
like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the In-
tuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances,
will not allow the reahst to say in his own words, it will suffer him
to say in proverbs without contradiction. And this law of laws,
which the pulpit, the senate and the college deny, is hourly preached
in all markets and all languages by flights of proverbs, whose teach-
ing is as true and as omnipresent as that of birds and flies.
All things are double, one against another. — Tit for tat; an eye for
an eye; a tooth for a tooth; blood for blood; measure for measure;
love for love. — Give, and it shall be given you. — He that watereth
shall be watered himself. — What will you have? quoth God; pay for
it and take it. — Nothing venture, nothing have. — Thou shalt be paid
94 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
exactly for what thou hast done, no more, no less. — Who doth not
work shall not eat. — Harm watch, harm catch. — Curses always
recoil on the head of him who imprecates them. — If you put a chain
around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your
own. — Bad counsel confounds the adviser. — The devil is an ass.
It is thus written, because it is thus in life. Our action is over-
mastered and characterized above our will by the law of nature. We
aim at a petty end quite aside from the public good, but our act
arranges itself by irresistible magnetism in a Une with the poles of
the world.
A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or
against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions
by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a
thread-ball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains in the
thrower's bag. Or, rather, it is a harpoon thrown at the whale, un-
winding, as it flies, a coil of cord in the boat, and, if the harpoon
is not good, or not well thrown, it will go nigh to cut the steersman
in twain or to sink the boat.
You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. "No man had
ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him," said Burke.
The exclusive in fashionable life does not see that he excludes him-
self from enjoyment, in the attempt to appropriate it. The exclusion-
ist in religion does not see that he shuts the door of heaven on
himself, in striving to shut out others. Treat men as pawns and
nine-pins and you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave out their
heart, you shall lose your own. The senses would make things of
all persons; of women, of children, of the poor. The vulgar proverb,
"I will get it from his purse or get it from his skin," is sound phi-
losophy.
All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speed-
ily punished. They are punished by Fear. Whilst I stand in simple
relations to my fellow-man, I have no displeasure in meeting him.
We meet as water meets water, or as two currents of air mix, with
perfect diffusion and interpenetration of nature. But as soon as
there is any departure from simplicity and attempt at halfness, or
good for me that is not good for him, my neighbor feels the wrong;
he shrinks from me as far as I have shrunk from him; his eyes no
COMPENSATION 95
longer seek mine; there is war between us; there is hate in him
and fear in me.
All the old abuses in society, the great and universal and the
petty and particular, all unjust accumulations of property and power,
are avenged in the same manner. Fear is an instructor of great
sagacity and the herald of all revolutions. One thing he always
teaches, that there is rottenness where he appears. He is a carrion
crow, and though you see not well what he hovers for, there is
death somewhere. Our property is timid, our laws are timid, our
cultivated classes are timid. Fear for ages has boded and mowed
and gibbered over government and property. That obscene bird
is not there for nothing. He indicates great wrongs which must
be revised.
Of the like nature is that expectation of change which instantly
follows the suspension of our voluntary activity. The terror of
cloudless noon, the emerald of Polycrates, the awe of prosperity,
the instinct which leads every generous soul to impose on itself
tasks of a noble asceticism and vicarious virtue, are the tremblings
of the balance of justice through the heart and mind of man.
Experienced men of the world know very well that it is best to
pay scot and lot as they go along, and that a man often pays dear
for a small frugality. The borrower runs in his own debt. Has a
man gained any thing who has received a hundred favors and ren-
dered none? Has he gained by borrowing, through indolence or
cunning, his neighbor's wares, or horses, or money.? There arises
on the deed the instant acknowledgment of benefit on the one part
and of debt on the other; that is, of superiority and inferiority. The
transaction remains in the memory of himself and his neighbor; and
every new transaction alters according to its nature their relation
to each other. He may soon come to see that he had better have
broken his own bones than to have ridden in his neighbor's coach,
and that "the highest price he can pay for a thing is to ask for it."
A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of life, and know
that it is always the part of prudence to face every claimant and
pay every just demand on your time, your talents, or your heart.
Always pay; for first or last you must pay your entire debt. Persons
and events may stand for a time between you and justice, but it is
96 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
only a postponement. You must pay at last your own debt. If you
are wise you will dread a prosperity which only loads you with
more. Benefit is the end of nature. But for every benefit which you
receive, a tax is levied. He is great who confers the most benefits.
He is base, — and that is the one base thing in the universe, — to re-
ceive favors and render none. In the order of nature we cannot
render benefits to those from whom we receive them, or only seldom.
But the benefit we receive must be rendered again, line for line, deed
for deed, cent for cent, to somebody. Beware of too much good
staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm worms. Pay
it away quickly in some sort.
Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. Cheapest, says
the prudent, is the dearest labor. What we buy in a broom, a mat,
a wagon, a knife, is some application of good sense to a common
want. It is best to pay in your land a skilful gardener, or to buy
good sense applied to gardening; in your sailor, good sense applied
to navigation; in the house, good sense applied to cooking, sewing,
serving; in your agent, good sense applied to accounts and affairs.
So do you multiply your presence, or spread yourself throughout
your estate. But because of the dual constitution of things, in labor
as in life there can be no cheating. The thief steals from himself.
The swindler swindles himself. For the real price of labor is knowl-
edge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs,
like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which
they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counter-
feited or stolen. These ends of labor cannot be answered but by real
exertions of the mind; and in obedience to pure motives. The
cheat, the defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the benefit, cannot
extort the knowledge of material and moral nature which his honest
care and pains yield to the operative. The law of nature is, Do the
thing, and you shall have the power; but they who do not the thing
have not the power.
Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a
stake to the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illus-
tration of the perfect compensation of the universe. Everywhere
and always this law is sublime. The absolute balance of Give and
Take, the doctrine that every thing has its price, and if that price is
COMPENSATION 97
not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained, and that
it is impossible to get anything without its price, is not less sublime
in the columns of a ledger than in the budgets of states, in the laws
of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature. I
cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees ever implicated
in those processes with which he is conversant, the stern ethics which
sparkle on his chisel-edge, which are measured out by his plumb
and foot-rule, which stand as manifest in the footing of the shop-bill
as in the history of a state, — do recommend to him his trade, and
though seldom named, exalt his business to his imagination.
The league between virtue and nature engages all things to
assume a hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and substances
of the world persecute and whip the traitor. He finds that things
are arranged for truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide
world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made
of glass. There is no such thing as concealment. Commit a crime,
and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals
in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and
mole. You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the
foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet
or clew. Always some damning circumstance transpires. The laws
and substances of nature, water, snow, wind, gravitation, become
penalties to the thief.
On the other hand the law holds with equal sureness for all right
action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically
just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation. The good
man has absolute good, which like fire turns every thing to its own
nature, so that you cannot do him any harm; but as the royal armies
sent against Napoleon, when he approached cast down their colors
and from enemies became friends, so do disasters of all kinds, as
sickness, offence, poverty, prove benefactors.
Winds blow and waters roll
Strength to the brave and power and deity,
Yet in themselves are nothing.
The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As no
man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no
98 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him.
The stag in the fable admired his horns and blamed his feet, but
when the hunter came, his feet saved him, and afterwards, caught
in the thicket, his horns destroyed him. Every man in his lifetime
needs to thank his faults. As no man thoroughly understands a
truth until first he has contended against it, so no man has a
thorough acquaintance with the hindrances or talents of men until
he has suffered from the one and seen the triumph of the other
over his own want of the same. Has he a defect of temper that
unfits him to live in society? Thereby he is driven to entertain
himself alone and acquire habits of self-help; and thus, like the
wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.
Our strength grows out of our weakness. Not until we are pricked
and stung and sorely shot at, awakens the indignation which arms
itself with secret forces. A great man is always willing to be Utde.
Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When
he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn some-
thing; he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained
facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has
got moderation and real skill. The wise man always throws himself
on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs
to find his weak point. The wound cicatrizes and falls off from him
like a dead skin and when they would triumph, lo! he has passed on
invulnerable. Blame is safer than praise. I hate to be defended in
a newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a
certain assurance of success. But as soon as honied words of praise
are spoken for me I feel as one that lies unprotected before his
enemies. In general, every evil to which we do not succumb is a
benefactor. As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and
valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the
strength of the temptation we resist.
The same guards which protect us from disaster, defect and en-
mity, defend us, if we will, from selfishness and fraud. Bolts and
bars are not the best of our institutions, nor is shrewdness in trade
a mark of wisdom. Men suffer all their life long under the foolish
superstition that they can be cheated. But it is as impossible for a
man to be cheated by any one but himself, as for a thing to be and
COMPENSATION 99
not to be at the same time. There is a third silent party to all our
bargains. The nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty
of the fulfilment of every contract, so that honest service cannot
come to loss. If you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more.
Put God in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer
the payment is withholden, the better for you; for compound interest
on compound interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.
The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature,
to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no
difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob.
A mob is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of
reason and traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descend-
ing to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its
actions are insane, hke its whole constitution. It persecutes a prin-
ciple; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by
inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who
have these. It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines
to put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The inviolate
spirit turns their spite against the wrongdoers. The martyr cannot
be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison
a more illustrious abode; every burned book or house enlightens
the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through
the earth from side to side. The minds of men are at last aroused;
reason looks out and justifies her own and malice finds all her
work in vain. It is the whipper who is whipped and the tyrant
who is undone.
Thus do all things preach the indifferency of circumstances. The
man is all. Every thing has two sides, a good and an evil. Every
advantage has its tax. I learn to be content. But the doctrine of
compensation is not the doctrine of indiflerency. The thoughdess
say, on hearing these representations, — What boots it to do well?
there is one event to good and evil; if I gain any good I must pay
for it; if I lose any good I gain some other; all actions are indifferent.
There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, its
own nature. The soul is not a compensation, but a life. The soul is.
Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and
100 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being.
Existence, or God, is not a relation or a part, but the whole. Being
is the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swal-
lowing up all relations, parts and times within itself. Nature,
truth, virtue, are the influx from thence. Vice is the absence or
departure of the same. Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as
the great Night or shade on which as a background the living
universe paints itself forth; but no fact is begotten by it; it cannot
work, for it is not. It cannot work any good; it cannot work any
harm. It is harm inasmuch as it is worse not to be than to be.
We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil acts, because the
criminal adheres to his vice and contumacy and does not come to
a crisis or judgment anywhere in visible nature. There is no stun-
ning confutation of his nonsense before men and angels. Has he
therefore outwitted the law? Inasmuch as he carries the malignity
and the lie with him he so far decreases from nature. In some man-
ner there will be a demonstration of the wrong to the understanding
also; but, should we not see it, this deadly deduction makes square
the eternal account.
Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of recti-
tude must be bought by any loss. There is no penalty to virtue; no
penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions of being. In a virtuous
action I properly am; in a virtuous act I add to the world; I plant
into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing and see the dark-
ness receding on the limits of the horizon. There can be no excess
to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty, when these attributes
are considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses all limits. It
affirms in man always an Optimism, never a Pessimism.
His life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct is trust. Our
instinct uses "more" and "less" in application to man, always of the
presence of the soul, and not of its absence; the brave man is greater
than the coward; the true, the benevolent, the wise, is more a man
and not less, than the fool and knave. There is therefore no tax
on the good of virtue, for that is the incoming of God himself, or
absolute existence, without any comparative. AH external good has
its tax, and if it came without desert or sweat, has no root in me, and
the next wind will blow it away. But all the good of nature is the
COMPENSATION 10 1
soul's, and may be had if paid for in nature's lawful coin, that is,
by labor which the heart and the head allow. I no longer wish to
meet a good I do not earn, for example to find a pot of buried gold,
knowing that it brings with it new responsibility. I do not wish
more external goods, — neither possessions, nor honors, nor powers,
nor persons. The gain is apparent; the tax is certain. But there
is no tax on the knowledge that the compensation exists and that it
is not desirable to dig up treasure. Herein I rejoice with a serene
eternal peace. I contract the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn
the wisdom of St. Bernard, "Nothing can work me damage except
myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never
am a real sufferer but by my own fault."
In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequalities
of condition. The radical tragedy of nature seems to be the distinc-
tion of More and Less. How can Less not feel the pain; how not feel
indignation or malevolence towards More ? Look at those who have
less faculty, and one feels sad and knows not well what to make
of it. Almost he shuns their eye; he fears they will upbraid God.
What should they do? It seems a great injustice. But see the facts
nearly and these mountainous inequaHties vanish. Love reduces
them as the sun melts the iceberg in the sea. The heart and soul
of all men being one, this bitterness of His and Mine ceases. His
is mine. I am my brother and my brother is me. If I feel over-
shadowed and outdone by great neighbors, I can get love; I can
still receive; and he that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he
loves. Thereby I make the discovery that my brother is my guardian,
acting for me with the friendliest designs, and the estate I so ad-
mired and envied is my own. It is the eternal nature of the soul
to appropriate and make all things its own. Jesus and Shakspeare
are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate
them in my own conscious domain. His virtue, — is not that mine?
His wit, — if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.
Such also is the natural history of calamity. The changes which
break up at short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements
of a nature whose law is growth. Evermore it is the order of nature
to grow, and every soul is by this intrinsic necessity quitting its
whole system of things, its friends and home and laws and faith,
102 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
as the shellfish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case, because it
no longer admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new house. In
proportion to the vigor of the individual these revolutions are fre-
quent, until in some happier mind they are incessant and all worldly
relations hang very loosely about him, becoming as it were a trans-
parent fluid membrane through which the living form is always
seen, and not, as in most men, an indurated heterogeneous fabric
of many dates and of no setded character, in which the man is
imprisoned. Then there can be enlargement, and the man of to-day
scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday. And such should be the
outward biography of man in time, a putting off of dead circum-
stances day by day, as he renews his raiment day by day. But to
us, in our lapsed estate, resting, not advancing, resisting, not co-
operating with the divine expansion, this growth comes by shocks.
We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go.
We do not see that they only go out that archangels may come in.
We are idolaters of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the
soul, in its proper eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe
there is any force in to-day to rival or re-create that beautiful yester-
day. We linger in the ruins of the old tent where once we had
bread and shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit can feed,
cover, and nerve us again. We cannot again find aught so dear,
so sweet, so graceful. But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of
the Almighty saith, "Up and onward forevermore!" We cannot
stay amid the ruins. Neither will we rely on the New; and so we
walk ever with reverted eyes, like those monsters, who look back-
wards.
And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the
understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutila-
tion, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems
at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal
the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a
dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but priva-
tion, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it
commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an
epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks
up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of Hving, and allows
COMPENSATION IO3
the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.
It permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances and the
reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to
the next years; and the man or woman who would have remained
a sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much
sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect
of the gardener is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and
fruit to wide neighborhoods of men.
FRIENDSHIP
(1841)
WE have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken.
Maugre all the selfishness that chills like east winds the
v^'orld, the whole human family is bathed with an element
of love like a fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses,
whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who honor us!
How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom, though
silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the language of these
wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth.
The effect of the indulgence of this human aflFection is a certain
cordial exhilaration. In poetry and in common speech the emotions
of benevolence and complacency which are felt towards others are
likened to the material effects of fire; so swift, or much more swift,
more active, more cheering, are these fine inward irradiations. From
the highest degree of passionate love to the lowest degree of good
will, they make the sweetness of life.
Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection.
The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do
not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it
is necessary to write a letter to a friend, — and forthwith troops of
gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words.
See, in any house where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpita-
tion which the approach of a stranger causes. A commended stran-
ger is expected and announced, and an uneasiness betwixt pleasure
and pain invades all the hearts of a household. His arrival almost
brings fear to the good hearts that would welcome him. The house
is dusted, all things fly into their places, the old coat is exchanged
for the new, and they must get up a dinner if they can. Of a com-
mended stranger, only the good report is told by others, only the
good and new is heard by us. He stands to us for humanity. He
is what we wish. Having imagined and invested him, we ask how
105
I06 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
we should stand related in conversation and action with such a
man, and are uneasy with fear. The same idea exalts conversation
with him. We talk better than we are wont. We have the nimblest
fancy, a richer memory, and our dumb devil has taken leave for the
time. For long hours we can continue a series of sincere, graceful,
rich communications, drawn from the oldest, secretest experience,
so that they who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and acquaintance,
shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual powers. But as soon as the
stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his definitions, his defects
into the conversation, it is all over. He has heard the first, the last
and best he will ever hear from us. He is no stranger now. Vul-
garity, ignorance, misapprehension are old acquaintances. Now,
when he comes, he may get the order, the dress and the dinner, —
but the throbbing of the heart and the communications of the
soul, no more.
Pleasant are these jets of aflfection which make a young world for
me again. Delicious is a just and firm encounter of two, in a
thought, in a feeling. How beautiful, on their approach to this
beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and the true! The
moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed:
there is no winter and no night: all tragedies, all ennuis vanish, —
all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms
all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured that some-
where in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be
content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.
I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends,
the old and the new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily
showeth himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace
solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the
lovely and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate.
Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, — a possession
for all time. Nor is nature so poor but she gives me this joy several
times, and thus we weave social threads of our own, a new web of
relations: and, as many thoughts in succession substantiate them-
selves, we shall by-and-by stand in a new world of our own creation,
and no longer strangers and pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My
friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to
FRIENDSHIP 107
me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I
find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them, both
deride and cancel the thick vi^alls of individual character, relation,
age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes
many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, who carry out
the world for me to new and noble depths, and enlarge the meaning
of all my thoughts. These are not stark and stiffened persons, but
the new-born poetry of God, — poetry without stop, — hymn, ode and
epic, poetry still flowing and not yet caked in dead books with an-
notation and grammar, but Apollo and the Muses chanting still.
Will these too separate themselves from me again, or some of them ?
I know not, but I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure that
we hold by simple affinity, and the Genius of my life being thus
social, the same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as
noble as these men and women, wherever I may be.
I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. It is
almost dangerous to me to "crush the sweet poison of misused wine"
of the affections. A new person is to me always a great event and
hinders me from sleep. I have had such fine fancies lately about
two or three persons which have given me delicious hours; but the
joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit. Thought is not born of it;
my action is very Httle modified. I must feel pride in my friend's
accompUshments as if they were mine, — wild, delicate, throbbing
property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the
lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden. We over-
estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better
than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Every thing
that is his, his name, his form, his dress, books and instruments,
fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his
mouth.
Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their
analogy in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship, like the immortality
of the soul, is too good to be believed. The lover, beholding his
maiden, half knows that she is not verily that which he worships;
and in the golden hour of friendship we are surprised with shades
of suspicion and unbelief. We doubt that we bestow on our hero
the virtues in which he shines, and afterwards worship the form
I08 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
to which we have ascribed this divine inhabitation. In strictness,
the soul does not respect men as it respects itself. In strict science
all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness.
Shall we fear to cool our love by facing the fact, by mining for
the metaphysical foundation of this Elysian temple? Shall I not be as
real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them
for what they are. Their essence is not less beautiful than their
appearance, though it needs finer organs for its apprehension. The
root of the plant is not unsightly to science, though for chaplets and
festoons we cut the stem short. And I must hazard the production
of the bald fact amidst these pleasing reveries, though it should prove
an Egyptian skull at our banquet. A man who stands united with
his thought conceives magnificently of himself. He is conscious of
a universal success, even though bought by uniform particular fail-
ures. No advantages, no powers, no gold or force, can be any match
for him. I cannot choose but rely on my own poverty more than
on your wealth. I cannot make your consciousness tantamount to
mine. Only the star dazzles; the planet has a faint, moon-like ray.
I hear what you say of the admirable parts and tried temper of the
party you praise, but I see well that, for all his purple cloaks, I shall
not like him, unless he is at last a poor Greek like me. I cannot
deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal includes
thee also in its pied and painted immensity, — thee also, compared
with whom all else is shadow. Thou art not Being, as Truth is, as
Justice is, — thou art not my soul, but a picture and effigy of that.
Thou hast come to me lately, and already thou art seizing thy hat
and cloak. Is it not that the soul puts forth friends as the tree puts
forth leaves, and presently, by the germination of new buds, extrudes
the old leaf? The law of nature is alternation forevermore. Each
electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself
with friends that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or
solitude; and it goes alone for a season that it may exalt its conver-
sation or society. This method betrays itself along the whole history
of our personal relations, the instinct of affection revives the hope
of union with our mates, and the returning sense of insulation re-
calls us from the chase. Thus every man passes his life in the search
FRIENDSHIP 109
after friendship, and if he should record his true sentiment, he might
write a letter like this to each new candidate for his love.
Dear Friend: If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to
match my mood with thine, I should never think again of trifles
in relation to thy comings and goings. I am not very wise: my
moods are quite attainable: and I respect thy genius: it is to me as
yet unfathomed; yet dare I not presume in thee a perfect intelligence
of me, and so thou art to me a delicious torment. Thine ever, or
Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity and
not for life. They are not to be indulged. This is to weave cobweb,
and not cloth. Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions,
because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead
of the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are
great, austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and
of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck
a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole
garden of God, which many summers and many winters must
ripen. We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulterate
passion which would appropriate him to ourselves. In vain. We
are armed all over with subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as we
meet, begin to play, and translate all poetry into stale prose. Almost
all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise,
and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each
of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other.
What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the
virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been compassed with
long foresight we must be tormented presently by baffled blows,
by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal
spirits, in the hey-dey of friendship and thought. Our faculties do
not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.
I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes no difference
how many friends I have and what content I can find in con-
versing with each, if there be one to whom I am not equal. If I
no RALPH WALDO EMERSON
have shrunk unequal from one contest, instantly the joy I find in
all the rest becomes mean and cowardly. I should hate myself, if
then I made my other friends my asylum.
The valiant warrior famoused for fight,
After a hundred victories, once foiled,
Is from the book of honor razed quite
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled.
Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and apathy
are a tough husk in which a delicate organization is protected from
premature ripening. It would be lost if it knew itself before any
of the best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Respect
the naturlangsaml^eit which hardens the ruby in a million years,
and works in duration in which Alps and Andes come and go as
rainbows. The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the
price of rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for
levity, but for the total worth of man. Let us not have this childish
luxury in our regards; but the austerest worth; let us approach
our friend with an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the
breadth, impossible to be overturned, of his foundations.
The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and I leave,
for the time, all account of subordinate social benefit, to speak of
that select and sacred relation which is a kind of absolute, and
which even leaves the language of love suspicious and common,
so much is this purer, and nothing is so much divine.
I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest
courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-
work, but the solidest thing we know. For now, after so many
ages of experience, what do we know of nature or of ourselves?
Not one step has man taken toward the solution of the problem of
his destiny. In one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe
of men. But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace which I draw from
this alUance with my brother's soul is the nut itself whereof all
nature and all thought is but the husk and shell. Happy is the
house that shelters a friend! It might well be built, like a festal
bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know
the solemnity of that relation and honor its law! It is no idle bond,
FRIENDSHIP III
no holiday engagement. He who offers himself a candidate for that
covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to the great games where
the first-born of the world are the competitors. He proposes him-
self for contest where Time, Want, Danger, are in the lists, and he
alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve
the dehcacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of all these. The
gifts of fortune may be present or absent, but all the hap in that
contest depends on intrinsic nobleness and the contempt of trifles.
There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship,
each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason
why either should be first named. One is Truth. A friend is a
person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.
I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that
I may drop even those most undermost garments of dissimulation,
courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may
deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one
chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like
diadems and authority, only to the highest rank, that being per-
mitted to speak truth, as having none above it to court or conform
unto. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second per-
son, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our
fellow man by compHments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs.
We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew
a man who under a certain religious frenzy cast off this drapery,
and omitting all compliment and commonplace, spoke to the con-
science of every person he encountered, and that with great insight
and beauty. At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was
mad. But persisting as indeed he could not help doing for some
time in this course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every
man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No man
would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off
with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But every man was
constrained by so much sincerity to face him, and what love of
nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he did certainly
show him. But to most of us society shows not its face and eye,
but its side and its back. To stand in true relations with men in a
false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not? We can seldom go
112 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
erect. Almost every man we meet requires some civility, requires
to be humored; — he has some fame, some talent, some whim of
religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned,
and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane
man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me
entertainment without requiring me to stoop, or to lisp, or to mask
myself. A friend therefore is a sort of paradox in nature. I who
alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm
with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my
being, in all its height, variety and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign
form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of
nature.
The other element of friendship is Tenderness. We are holden
to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by
lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and
badge and trifle, but we can scarce believe that so much character
can subsist in another as to draw us by love. Can another be so
blessed and we so pure that we can offer him tenderness? When
a man becomes dear to me I have touched the goal of fortune. I
find very little written directly to the heart of this matter in books.
And yet I have one text which I cannot choose but remember. My
author says, "I offer myself faintly and bluntly to those whose I
effectually am, and tender myself least to him to whom I am the
most devoted." I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as
eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it
walks over the moon. I wish it to be a litde of a citizen, before it
is quite a cherub. We chide the citizen because he makes love a
commodity. It is an exchange of gifts, of useful loans; it is good
neighborhood; it watches with the sick; it holds the pall at the
funeral; and quite loses sight of the delicacies and nobiUty of the
relation. But though we cannot find the god under this disguise of
a sutler, yet on the other hand we cannot forgive the poet if he spins
his thread too fine and does not substantiate his romance by the
municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity and pity. I hate
the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and
worldly alliances. I much prefer the company of ploughboys and
tin-pedlars to the silken and perfumed amity which only celebrates
FRIENDSHIP 113
its days of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle
and dinners at the best taverns. The end of friendship is a com-
merce the most strict and homely that can be joined; more strict
than any of which we have experience. It is for aid and comfort
through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit
for serene days and graceful gifts and country rambles, but also for
rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty and persecution. It
keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the trances of religion.
We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man's
life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and unity. It should never
fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert and
inventive and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery.
For perfect friendship may be said to require natures so rare and
costly, so well tempered each and so happily adapted, and withal
so circumstanced (for even in that particular, a poet says, love de-
mands that the parties be altogether paired), that very seldom can
its satisfaction be realized. It cannot subsist in its perfection, say
some of those who are learned in this warm lore of the heart,
betwixt more than two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, per-
haps because I have never known so high a fellowship as others.
I please my imagination more with a circle of godlike men and
women variously related to each other and between whom subsists
a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of one to one peremptory
for conversation, which is the practice and consummation of friend-
ship. Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good
and bad. You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at
several times with two several men, but let all three of you come
together and you shall not have one new and hearty word. Two
may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a con-
versation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company
there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes
place when you leave them alone. In good company the individuals
at once merge their egotism into a social soul exactly coextensive
with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of
friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to hus-
band, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then
speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not
114 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense
demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which
requires an absolute running of two souls into one.
No two men but being left alone with each other enter into
simpler relations. Yet it is afiinity that determines which two shall
converse. Unrelated men give little joy to each other; will never
suspect the latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a great
talent for conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some
individuals. Conversation is an evanescent relation, — no more. A
man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all
that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence
with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial
in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who
enjoy his thought he will regain his tongue.
Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlike-
ness that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in
the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather
than that my friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real
sympathy. I am equally baulked by antagonism and by compliance.
Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have
in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine. It turns the stomach,
it blots the daylight; where I looked for a manly furtherance or at
least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be a
nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition which
high friendship demands is ability to do without it. To be capable
that high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be
very two, before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two
large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before
yet they recognise the deep identity which, beneath these disparities,
unites them.
He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous. He must
be so to know its law. He must be one who is sure that greatness
and goodness are always economy. He must be one who is not
swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not dare to inter-
meddle with this. Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor ex-
pect to accelerate the births of the eternal. Friendship demands a
religious treatment. We must not be wilful, we must not provide.
FRIENDSHIP 115
We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Rever-
ence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course
if he be a man he has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot
honor if you must needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside.
Give those merits room. Let them mount and expand. Be not so
much his friend that you can never know his peculiar energies,
like fond mammas who shut up their boy in the house until he is
almost grown a girl. Are you the friend of your friend's buttons,
or of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a
thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest ground.
Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property, and
to suck a short and ill-confounding pleasure, instead of the pure
nectar of God.
Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation. Why
should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them ?
Why insist on rash personal relations with your friend? Why go
to his house, or know his mother and brother and sisters? Why be
visited by him at your own? Are these things material to our
covenant? Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a
spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want,
but not news, nor pottage. I can get politics and chat and neigh-
borly conveniences from cheaper companions. Should not the
society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal and great as
nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison
with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump
of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, but raise
it to that standard. That great defying eye, that scornful beauty
of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but
rather fortify and enhance. Worship his superiorities. Wish him
not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all. Guard him as
thy great counterpart; have a princedom to thy friend. Let him be
to thee forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly
revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast
aside. The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to
be seen if the eye is too near. To my friend I write a letter and from
him I receive a letter. That seems to you a little. Me it suffices.
It is a spiritual gift, worthy of him to give and of me to receive.
Il6 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
It profanes nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust itself,
as it will not to the tongue, and pour out the prophecy of a godlier
existence than all the annals of heroism have yet made good.
Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not to prejudice
its perfect flower by your impatience for its opening. We must be
our own before we can be another's. There is at least this satis-
faction in crime, according to the Latin proverb; you can speak
to your accomplice on even terms. Crimen quos inquinat, cequat.
To those whom we admire and love, at first we cannot. Yet the
least defect of self-possession vitiates, in my judgment, the entire
relation. There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never
mutual respect, until in their dialogue each stands for the whole
world.
What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur
of spirit we can. Let us be silent, — so we may hear the whisper of
the gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast about what
you should say to the select souls, or to say anything to such? No
matter how ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There
are innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say
aught is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy soul shall speak. Wait until
the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night
avail themselves of your lips. The only money of God is God. He
pays never with any thing less, or any thing else. The only reward
of virtue is virtue: the only way to have a friend is to be one. You
shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house. If unlike,
his soul only flees the faster from you, and you shall catch never
a true glance of his eye. We see the noble afar off and they repel
us; why should we intrude? Late, — very late, — we perceive that no
arrangements, no introductions, no consuetudes or habits of society
would be of any avail to establish us in such relations with them
as we desire, — ^but solely the uprise of nature in us to the same
degree it is in them: then shall we meet as water with water: and
if we should not meet them then, we shall not want them, for
we are already they. In the last analysis, love is only the reflection
of a man's own worthiness from other men. Men have sometimes
exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that
in their friend each loved his own soul.
FRIENDSHIP 117
The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less
easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the
world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a
sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other
regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring
and daring, which can love us and which we can love. We may
congratulate ourselves that the period of nonage, of follies, of
blunders and of shame, is passed in solitude, and when we are
finished men we shall grasp heroic hands in heroic hands. Only
be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of
friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our
impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God
attends. By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little
you gain the great. You become pronounced. You demonstrate your-
self, so as to put yourself out of the reach of false relations, and
draw to you the first-born of the world, — those rare pilgrims whereof
only one or two wander in nature at once, and before whom the
vulgar great show as spectres and shadows merely.
It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if so
we could lose any genuine love. Whatever correction of our pop-
ular views we make from insight, nature will be sure to bear us
out in, and though it seem to rob us of some joy, will repay us
with a greater. Let us feel if we will the absolute insulation of man.
We are sure that we have all in us. We go to Europe, or we pursue
persons, or we read books, in the instinctive faith that these will
call it out and reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all. The persons
are such as we; the Europe, an old faded garment of dead persons;
the books, their ghosts. Let us drop this idolatry. Let us give over
this mendicancy. Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and
defy them, saying "Who are you? Unhand me: I will be dependent
no more." Ah! seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to
meet again on a higher platform, and only be more each other's
because we are more our own? A friend is Janus-faced: he looks
to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours,
the prophet of those to come. He is the harbinger of a greater
friend. It is the property of the divine to be reproductive.
I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have
Il8 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have
society on our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the sUghtest
cause. I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If he is great
he makes me so great that I cannot descend to converse. In the
great days, presentiments hover before me, far before me, in the
firmament. I ought then to dedicate myself to them. I go in that
I may seize them, I go out that I may seize them. I fear only that
I may lose them receding into the sky in which now they are only
a patch of brighter light. Then, though I prize my friends, I can-
not aflord to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my
own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this
lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy or search of stars, and come
down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall
mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods. It is true, next
week I shall have languid times, when I can well aflord to occupy
myself with foreign objects; then I shall regret the lost literature of
your mind, and wish you were by my side again. But if you come,
perhaps you will fill my mind only with new visions; not with
yourself but with your lustres, and I shall not be able any more
than now to converse with you. So I will owe to my friends this
evanescent intercourse. I will receive from them not what they have
but what they are. They shall give me that which properly they
cannot give me, but which emanates from them. But they shall
not hold me by any relations less subtle and pure. We will meet
as though we met not, and part as though we parted not.
It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry
a friendship greatly on one side, without due correspondence on
the other. Why should I cumber myself with the poor fact that the
receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of
his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small
part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude
and cold companion. If he is unequal he will presendy pass away;
but thou art enlarged by thy own shining, and no longer a mate
for frogs and worms, dost soar and burn with the gods of the
empyrean. It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. But the
great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love tran-
scends instantly the unworthy object and dwells and broods on the
FRIENDSHIP 119
eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad,
but feels rid of so much earth and feels its independency the surer.
Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to
the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness, a total mag-
nanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity.
It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both.
HEROISM
(1841)
Paradise is under the shadow of swords.
— Mahomet.
IN the elder English dramatists, and mainly in the plays o£
Beaumont and Fletcher, there is a constant recognition of gen-
tility, as if a noble behavior were as easily marked in the society
of their age as color is in our American population. When any
Rodrigo, Pedro or Valerio enters, though he be a stranger, the
duke or governor exclaims, "This is a gentleman," and proffers
civilities without end; but all the rest are slag and refuse. In har-
mony with this delight in personal advantages there is in their plays
a certain heroic cast of character and dialogue, — as in Bonduca,
Sophocles, the Mad Lover, the Double Marriage, — wherein the
speaker is so earnest and cordial and on such deep grounds of
character, that the dialogue, on the slightest additional incident
in the plot, rises naturally into poetry. Among many texts take the
following. The Roman Martius has conquered Athens, — all but the
invincible spirits of Sophocles, the duke of Athens, and Dorigen, his
wife. The beauty of the latter inflames Martius, and he seeks to
save her husband; but Sophocles will not ask his life, although
assured that a word will save him, and the execution of both pro-
ceeds : —
Valerius. Bid thy wife farewell.
Soph. No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen,
Yonder, above, 'bout Ariadne's crown,
My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste.
Dor. Stay, Sophocles, — with this tie up my sight;
Let not soft nature so transformed be.
And lose her gentler sexed humanity,
To make me see my lord bleed. So, 't is well;
Never one object underneath the sun
Will I behold before my Sophocles:
Farewell; now teach the Romans how to die.
122 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Mar. Dost know what 't is to die ?
Sopfi. Thou dost not, Martins,
And, therefore, not what 't is to live; to die
Is to begin to live. It is to end
An old, stale, weary work and to commence
A newer and a better. 'T is to leave
Deceitful knaves for the society
Of gods and goodness. Thou thyself must part
At last from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs,
And prove thy fortitude what then 't will do.
Val. But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus.?
Soph. Why should I grieve or vex for being sent
To them I ever loved best ? Now I'll kneel.
But with my back toward thee: 't is the last duty
This trunk can do the gods.
Mar. Strike, strike, Valerius,
Or Martins' heart will leap out at his mouth.
This is a man, a woman. Kiss thy lord,
And live with all the freedom you were wont.
O love! thou doubly hast afflicted me
With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart,
My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn,
Ere thou transgress this knot of piety.
Val. What ails my brother?
Soph. Martius, O Martins,
Thou now hast found a way to conquer me.
Dor. O star of Rome! what gratitude can speak
Fit words to follow such a deed as this?
Mar. This admirable duke, Valerius,
With his disdain of fortune and of death,
Captived himself, has captivated me.
And though my arm hath ta'en his body here.
His soul hath subjugated Martius' soul.
By Romulus, he is all soul, I think;
He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved.
Then we have vanquished nothing; he is free,
And Martius walks now in captivity.
I do not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, novel or
oration that our press vents in the last few^ years, which goes to the
same tune. We have a great many flutes and flageolets, but not
often the sound of any fife. Yet Wordsworth's "Laodamia," and
the ode of "Dion," and some sonnets, have a certain noble music;
and Scott will sometimes draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord
HEROISM 123
Evandale given by Balfour of Burley. Thomas Carlyle, with his
natural taste for what is manly and daring in character, has suffered
no heroic trait in his favorites to drop from his biographical and
historical pictures. Earlier, Robert Burns has given us a song or
two. In the Harleian Miscellanies there is an account of the battle
of Lutzen which deserves to be read. And Simon Ockley's History
of the Saracens recounts the prodigies of individual valor, with
admiration all the more evident on the part of the narrator that
he seems to think that his place in Christian Oxford requires of him
some proper protestations of abhorrence. But if we explore the
literature of Heroism we shall quickly come to Plutarch, who is its
Doctor and historian. To him we owe the Brasidas, the Dion, the
Epaminondas, the Scipio of old, and I must think we are more
deeply indebted to him than to all the ancient writers. Each of
his "Lives" is a refutation to the despondency and cowardice of
our religious and political theorists. A wild courage, a stoicism not
of the schools but of the blood, shines in every anecdote, and has
given that book its immense fame.
We need books of this tart cathartic virtue more than books of
pohtical science or of private economy. Life is a festival only to the
wise. Seen from the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears
a ragged and dangerous front. The violations of the laws of nature
by our predecessors and our contemporaries are punished in us also.
The disease and deformity around us certify the infraction of nat-
ural, intellectual and moral laws, and often violation on violation
to breed such compound misery. A lockjaw that bends a man's head
back to his heels; hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and
babes; insanity that makes him eat grass; war, plague, cholera,
famine, indicate a certain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its
inlet by human crime, must have its outlet by human suffering.
Unhappily almost no man exists who has not in his own person
become to some amount a stockholder in the sin, and so made
himself liable to a share in the expiation.
Our culture therefore must not omit the arming of the man. Let
him hear in season that he is born into the state of war, and that the
commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not
go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected and
124 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both repu-
tation and hfe in his hand, and with perfect urbanity dare the gibbet
and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech and the rectitude
of his behavior.
Towards all this external evil the man within the breast assumes
a warlike attitude, and affirms his ability to cope single-handed with
the infinite army of enemies. To this military attitude of the soul
we give the name of Heroism. Its rudest form is the contempt for
safety and ease, which makes the attractiveness of war. It is a self-
trust which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its
energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is
a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will,
but pleasantly and as it were merrily he advances to his own music,
alike in frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal disso-
luteness. There is somewhat not philosophical in heroism; there is
somewhat not holy in it; it seems not to know that other souls are
of one texture with it; it hath pride; it is the extreme of individual
nature. Nevertheless we must profoundly revere it. There is some-
what in great actions which does not allow us to go behind them.
Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right; and
although a different breeding, different religion and greater intellec-
tual activity would have modified or even reversed the particular
action, yet for the hero that thing he does is the highest deed, and is
not open to the censure of philosophers or divines. It is the avowal
of the unschooled man that he finds a quality in him that is negli-
gent of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, of reproach,
and that he knows that his will is higher and more excellent than
all actual and all possible antagonists.
Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in
contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Hero-
ism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual's character.
Now to no other man can its wisdom appear as it does to him, for
every man must be supposed to see a little farther on his own proper
path than any one else. Therefore just and wise men take umbrage
at his act, until after some little time be past: then they see it to be
in unison with their acts. All prudent men see that the action is
clean contrary to a sensual prosperity; for every heroic act measures
HEROISM 125
itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own
success at last, and then the prudent also extol.
Self -trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of the soul at war,
and its ultimate objects are the last defiance of falsehood and wrong,
and the power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents. It
speaks the truth and it is just. It is generous, hospitable, temperate,
scornful of petty calculations and scornful of being scorned. It
persists; it is of an undaunted boldness and of a fortitude not to be
wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common life. That false
prudence which dotes on health and wealth is the foil, the butt and
merriment of heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed
of its body. What shall it say then to the sugar-plums and cats'-
cradles, to the toilet, compliments, quarrels, cards and custard, which
rack the wit of all human society ? What joys has kind nature pro-
vided for us dear creatures! There seems to be no interval between
greatness and meanness. When the spirit is not master of the world,
then it is its dupe. Yet the little man takes the great hoax so inno-
cently, works in it so headlong and believing, is born red, and dies
gray, arranging his toilet, attending on his own health, laying traps
for sweet food and strong wine, setting his heart on a horse or a
rifle, made happy with a Httle gossip or a little praise, that the great
soul cannot choose but laugh at such earnest nonsense. "Indeed,
these humble considerations make me out of love with greatness.
What a disgrace is it to me to take note how many pairs of silk
stockings thou hast, namely, these and those that were the peach-
colored ones; or to bear the inventory of thy shirts, as one for
superfluity, and one other for use."
Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic, consider the in-
convenience of receiving strangers at their fireside', reckon narrowly
the loss of time and the unusual display : the soul of a better quality
thrusts back the unseasonable economy into the vaults of life, and
says, I will obey the God, and the sacrifice and the fire he will
provide. Ibn Hankal, the Arabian geographer, describes a heroic
extreme in the hospitality of Sogd, in Bukharia. "When I was in
Sogd I saw a great building, like a palace, the gates of which were
open and fixed back to the wall with large nails. I asked the reason,
and was told that the house had not been shut, night or day, for
126 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
a hundred years. Strangers may present themselves at any hour
and in whatever number; the master has amply provided for the
reception of the men and their animals and is never happier than
when they tarry for some time. Nothing of the kind have I seen
in any other country." The magnanimous know very well that they
who give time, or money, or shelter, to the stranger, — so it be done
for love and not for ostentation, — do, as it were, put God under
obligation to them, so perfect are the compensations of the universe.
In some way the time they seem to lose is redeemed and the pains
they seem to take remunerate themselves. These men fan the flame
of human love and raise the standard of civil virtue among mankind.
But hospitality must be for service and not for show, or it pulls
down the host. The brave soul rates itself too high to value itself
by the splendor of its table and draperies. It gives what it hath,
and all it hath, but its own majesty can lend a better grace to ban-
nocks and fair water than belong to city feasts.
The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish to do
no dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he loves it for its elegancy,
not for its austerity. It seems not worth his while to be solemn and
denounce with bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of
tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold. A great man scarcely
knows how he dines, how he dresses, but without railing or pre-
cision his living is natural and poetic. John Eliot, the Indian Apostle,
drank water, and said of wine, "It is a noble, generous liquor and
we should be humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water
was made before it." Better still is the temperance of King David,
who poured out on the ground unto the Lord the water which
three of his warriors had brought him to drink, at the peril of their
lives.
It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on his sword after the battle
of Philippi, he quoted a line of Euripides, "O Virtue! I have fol-
lowed thee through life, and I find thee at last but a shade." I
doubt not the hero is slandered by this report. The heroic soul does
not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely
and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that
virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. Plenty does not need it,
and can very well abide its loss.
HEROISM 127
But that which takes my fancy most in the heroic class, is the
good-humor and hilarity they exhibit. It is a height to which
common duty can very well attain, to suffer and to dare with
solemnity. But these rare souls set opinion, success, and h£e at so
cheap a rate that they will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or
the show of sorrow, but wear their own habitual greatness. Scipio,
charged with peculation, refuses to do himself so great a disgrace
as to wait for justification, though he had the scroll of his accounts
in his hands, but tears it to pieces before the tribunes. Socrates's
condemnation of himself to be maintained in all honor in the Pry-
taneum, during his life, and Sir Thomas More's playfulness at the
scaffold, are of the same strain. In Beaumont and Fletcher's "Sea
Voyage," Juletta tells the stout captain and his company, —
Jul. Why, slaves, 't is in our power to hang ye.
Master. Very likely,
'T is in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.
These rephes are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom and glow
of a perfect health. The great will not condescend to take any thing
seriously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were
the building of cities or the eradication of old and fooUsh churches
and nations which have cumbered the earth long thousands of
years. Simple hearts put all the history and customs of this world
behind them, and play their own play in innocent defiance of the
Blue-Laws of the world; and such would apf>ear, could we see
the human race assembled in vision, like little children frolicking
together, though to the eyes of mankind at large they wear a stately
and solemn garb of works and influences.
The interest these fine stories have for us, the power of a romance
over the boy who grasps the forbidden book under his bench at
school, our delight in the hero, is the main fact to our purpose. All
these great and transcendent properties are ours. If we dilate in
beholding the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it is that we are
already domesticating the same sentiment. Let us find room for this
great guest in our small houses. The first step of worthiness will
be to disabuse us of our superstitious associations with places and
times, with nimiber and size. Why should these words, Athenian,
Roman, Asia and England, so tingle in the ear.'' Let us feel that
128 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not
in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River and
Boston Bay you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of
foreign and classic topography. But here we are: — that is a great
fact, and, if we will tarry a little, we may come to learn that here
is best. See to it only that thyself is here, — and art and nature, hope
and dread, friends, angels and the Supreme Being shall not be
absent from the chamber where thou sittest. Epaminondas, brave
and affectionate, does not seem to us to need Olympus to die upon,
nor the Syrian sunshine. He lies very well where he is. The Jerseys
were handsome ground enough for Washington to tread, and Lon-
don streets for the feet of Milton. A great man illustrates his place,
makes his climate genial in the imagination of men, and its air the
beloved element of all delicate spirits. That country is the fairest
which is inhabited by the noblest minds. The pictures which fill the
imagination in reading the actions of Pericles, Xenophon, Colum-
bus, Bayard, Sidney, Hampden, teach us how needlessly mean our
life is; that we, by the depth of our living, should deck it with more
than regal or national splendor, and act on principles that should
interest man and nature in the length of our days.
We have seen or heard of many extraordinary young men who
never ripened, or whose performance in actual life was not extraor-
dinary. When we see their air and mien, when we hear them speak
of society, of books, of religion, we admire their superiority; they
seem to throw contempt on the whole state of the world; theirs is
the tone of a youthful giant who is sent to work revolutions. But
they enter an active profession and the forming Colossus shrinks to
the common size of man. The magic they used was the ideal tend-
encies, which always makes the Actual ridiculous; but the tough
world has its revenge the moment they put their horses of the sun to
plough in its furrow. They found no example and no companion,
and their heart fainted. What then? The lesson they gave in their
first aspirations is yet true; and a better valor and a purer truth shall
one day execute their will and put the world to shame. Or why
should a woman liken herself to any historical woman, and think,
because Sappho, or Sevigne, or De Stael, or the cloistered souls who
have had genius and cultivation do not satisfy the imagination and
HEROISM 129
the serene Themis, none can, — certainly not she. Why not? She has
a new and unattempted problem to solve, perchance that of the
happiest nature that ever bloomed. Let the maiden, with erect soul,
walk serenely on her way, accept the hint of each new experience, try
in turn all the gifts God offers her that she may learn the power and
the charm that like a new dawn radiating of the deep of space, her
new-born being is. The fair girl who repels interference by a decided
and proud choice of influences, so careless of pleasing, so wilful and
lofty, inspires every beholder with somewhat of her own nobleness.
The silent heart encourages her; O friend, never strike sail to a fear.
Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas. Not in vain you
live, for every passing eye is cheered and refined by the vision.
The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men
have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you
have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to
reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the com-
mon, nor the common the heroic. Yet we have the weakness to
expect the sympathy of people in those actions whose excellence is
that they outrun sympathy and appeal to a tardy justice. If you would
serve your brother, because it is fit for you to serve him, do not take
back your words when you find that prudent people do not com-
mend you. Be true to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you
have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monot-
ony of a decorous age. It was a high counsel that I once heard given
to a young person, "Always do what you are afraid to do." A simple
manly character need never make an apology, but should regard its
past action with the calmness of Phocion, when he admitted that the
event of the battle was happy, yet did not regret his dissuasion from
the batde.
There is no weakness or exposure for which we cannot find con-
solation in the thought, — this is a part of my constitution, part of
my relation and office to my fellow-creature. Has nature covenanted
with me that I should never appear to disadvantage, never make a
ridiculous figure? Let us be generous of our dignity as well as of
our money. Greatness once and for ever has done with opinion. We
tell our charities, not because we wish to be praised for them, not
because we think they have great merit, but for our justification. It is
130 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
a capital blunder; as you discover when another man recites his
charities.
To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to live with some
rigor of temperance, or some extremes of generosity, seems to be an
asceticism which common good nature would appoint to those who
are at ease and in plenty, in sign that they feel a brotherhood with the
great multitude of suffering men. And not only need we breathe and
exercise the soul by assuming the penalties of abstinence, of debt, of
solitude, of unpopularity, but it behooves the wise man to look with
a bold eye into those rarer dangers which sometimes invade men,
and to familiarize himself with disgusting forms of disease, with
sounds of execration, and the vision of violent death.
Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the day never
shines in which this element may not work. The circumstances of
man, we say, are historically somewhat better in this country and at
this hour than perhaps ever before. More freedom exists for culture.
It will not now run against an axe at the first step out of the beaten
track of opinion. But whoso is heroic will always find crises to try his
edge. Human virtue demands her champions and martyrs, and the
trial of persecution always proceeds. It is but the other day that the
brave Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights
of free speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to live.
I see not any road of perfect peace which a man can walk, but to
take counsel of his own bosom. Let him quit too much association,
let him go home much, and stablish himself in those courses he ap-
proves. The unremitting retention of simple and high sentiments in
obscure duties is hardening the character to that temper which will
work with honor, if need be in the tumult, or on the scaffold. What-
ever outrages have happened to men may befall a man again: and
very easily in a republic, if there appear any signs of a decay of
religion. Coarse slander, fire, tar and feathers and the gibbet, the
youth may freely bring home to his mind and with what sweetness
of temper he can, and inquire how fast he can fix his sense of duty,
braving such penalties, whenever it may please the next newspaper
and a sufficient number of his neighbors to pronounce his opinions
incendiary.
HEROISM 131
It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the most susceptible
heart to see how quick a bound Nature has set to the utmost inflic-
tion of malice. We rapidly approach a brink over which no enemy
can follow us.
Let them rave:
Thou art quiet in thy grave.
In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the hour when we
are deaf to the higher voices, who does not envy them who have seen
safely to an end their manful endeavor ? Who that sees the meanness
of our politics but inly congratulates Washington that he is long
already wrapped in his shroud, and for ever safe; that he was laid
sweet in his grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated in him?
Who does not sometimes envy the good and brave who are no more
to suffer from the tumults of the natural world, and await with
curious complacency the speedy term of his own conversation with
finite nature ? And yet the love that will be annihilated sooner than
treacherous has already made death impossible, and affirms itself no
mortal but a native of the deeps of absolute and inextinguishable
being.
THE OVER-SOUL
(1841)
But souls that of his own good H£e partake,
He loves as his own self; dear as his eye
They are to Him: He'll never them forsake:
When they shall die, then God himself shall die:
They live, they live in blest eternity.
— Henry More.
THERE is a difference between one and another hour of
life in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith
comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth
in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality
to them than to all other experiences. For this reason the argument
which is always forthcoming to silence those who conceive extra-
ordinary hopes of man, namely the appeal to experience, is for ever
invalid and vain. A mightier hope abolishes despair. We give up
the past to the objector, and yet we hope. He must explain this hope.
We grant that human life is mean, but how did we find out that it
was mean? What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this
old discontent? What is the universal sense of want and ignorance,
but the fine innuendo by which the great soul makes its enormous
claim? Why do men feel that the natural history of man has never
been written, but always he is leaving behind what you have said
of him, and it becomes old, and books of metaphysics worthless?
The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the cham-
bers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always
remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man
is a stream whose source is hidden. Always our being is descending
into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has
no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not baulk the very
next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a
higher origin for events than the will I call mine.
As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing
133
134 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams
into me, — I see that I am a pensioner, — not a cause but a surprised
spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up and put
myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the
visions come.
The Supreme Critic on all the errors of the past and the present,
and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in
which we rest as the earth Ues in the soft arms of the atmosphere;
that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular
being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart
of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right
action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our
tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is,
and to speak from his character and not from his tongue, and which
evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand and become wis-
dom and virtue and power and beauty. We live in succession, in
division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of
the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part
and particle is equally related; the eternal. One. And this deep
power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us,
is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of
seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and
the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the
moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the
shining parts, is the soul. Only by the vision of that Wisdom can
the horoscope of the ages be read, and by falling back on our better
thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of prophecy which is innate in
every man that we can know what it saith. Every man's words who
speaks from that life must sound vain to those who do not dwell in
the same thought on their own part. I dare not speak for it. My
words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold. Only
itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be
lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I
desire, even by profane words, if sacred I may not use, to indicate the
heaven of this deity and to report what hints I have collected of the
transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law.
If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, in re-
THE OVER-SOUL 1 35
morse, in times of passion, in surprises, in the instructions of dreams,
wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade, — the droll disguises
only magnifying and enhancing a real element and forcing it on our
distinct notice, — we shall catch many hints that will broaden and
lighten into knowledge of the secret of nature. All goes to show that
the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the
organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation,
of comparison, — but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but
a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect
and the will; — is the vast background of our being, in which they
lie, — an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From
within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things and
makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. A man is
the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. What
we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting
man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepre-
sents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he
is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees
bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it
breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affec-
tion, it is love. And the blindness of the intellect begins when it
would be something of itself. The weakness of the will begins when
the individual would be something of himself. All reform aims in
some one particular to let the great soul have its way through us; in
other words, to engage us to obey.
Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible. Language
cannot paint it with his colors. It is too subtle. It is undefinable, un-
measurable; but we know that it pervades and contains us. We know
that all spiritual being is in man. A wise old proverb says, "God
comes to see us without bell:" that is, as there is no screen or ceiling
between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall
in the soul, where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins.
The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of
spiritual nature, to all the attributes of God. Justice we see and know,
Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but
always they tower over us, and most in the moment when our
interests tempt us to wound them.
136 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is made known
by its independency of those hmitations which circumscribe us on
every hand. The soul circumscribeth all things. As I have said, it
contradicts all experience. In like manner it abolishes time and
space. The influence of the senses has in most men overpowered the
mind to that degree that the walls of time and space have come to
look solid, real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of
these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and space
are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. A man is capable of
abolishing them both. The spirit sports with time —
Can crowd eternity into an hour,
Or stretch an hour to eternity.
We are often made to feel that there is another youth and age than
that which is measured from the year of our natural birth. Some
thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is
the love of the universal and eternal beauty. Every man parts from
that contemplation with the feeling that it rather belongs to ages than
to mortal life. The least activity of the intellectual powers redeems us
in a degree from the influences of time. In sickness, in languor, give
us a strain of poetry or a profound sentence, and we are refreshed;
or produce a volume of Plato or Shakspeare, or remind us of their
names, and instantly we come into a feeling of longevity. See how
the deep divine thought demolishes centuries and millenniums, and
makes itself present through all ages. Is the teaching of Christ less
effective now than it was when first his mouth was opened? The
emphasis of facts and persons to my soul has nothing to do with
time. And so always the soul's scale is one; the scale of the senses
and the understanding is another. Before the great revelations of the
soul. Time, Space and Nature shrink away. In common speech we
refer all things to time, as we habitually refer the immensely sun-
dered stars to one concave sphere. And so we say that the Judgment
is distant or near, that the Millennium approaches, that a day of
certain political, moral, social reforms is at hand, and the like, when
we mean that in the nature of things one of the facts we contemplate
is external and fugitive, and the other is permanent and connate with
the soul. The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach
THE OVER-SOUL I37
themselves like ripe fruit from our experience, and fall. The wind
shall blow them none knows whither. The landscape, the figures,
Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any institution past, or any
whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society, and so is the world. The
soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world always before her,
leaving worlds alway behind her. She has no dates, nor rites, nor
persons, nor specialties, nor men. The soul knows only the soul; all
else is idle weeds for her wearing.
After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate of its progress
to be computed. The soul's advances are not made by gradation,
such as can be represented by motion in a straight line, but rather by
ascension of state, such as can be represented by metamorphosis, —
from the egg to the worm, from the worm to the fly. The growths
of genius are of a certain total character, that does not advance the
elect individual first over John, then Adam, then Richard, and give
to each the pain of discovered inferiority, but by every throe of
growth the man expands there where he works, passing at each pul-
sation, classes, populations, of men. With each divine impulse the
mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into
eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It converses with truths that
. have always been spoken in the world and becomes conscious of a
closer sympathy with Zeno and Arrian than with the persons in the
house.
This is the law of moral and of mental gain. The simple rise as by
specific levity not into a particular virtue, but into the region of all
the virtues. They are in the spirit which contains them all. The soul
is superior to all the particulars of merit. The soul requires purity,
but purity is not it; requires justice, but justice is not that; requires
beneficence, but is somewhat better: so that there is a kind of descent
and accommodation felt when we leave speaking of moral nature to
. urge a virtue which it enjoins. For, to the soul in her pure action all
the virtues are natural, and not painfully acquired. Speak to his
heart, and the man becomes suddenly virtuous.
Within the same sentiment is the germ of intellectual growth,
which obeys the same law. Those who are capable of humility, of
justice, of love, of aspiration, are already on a platform that com-
mands the sciences and arts, speech and poetry, action and grace.
138 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
For whoso dwells in this moral beatitude does already anticipate
those special powers which men prize so highly; just as love does
justice to all the gifts of the object beloved. The lover has no talent,
no skill, which passes for quite nothing with his enamored maiden,
however litde she may possess of related faculty; and the heart
which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all
its works, and will travel a royal road to particular knowledges and
powers. For in ascending to this primary and aboriginal sentiment
we have come from our remote station on the circumference instan-
taneously to the centre of the world, where, as in the closet of God,
we see causes, and anticipate the universe, which is but a slow effect.
One mode of the divine teaching is the incarnation of the spirit in
a form, — in forms, like my own. I live in society; with persons who
answer to thoughts in my own mind, or outwardly express a certain
obedience to the great instincts to which I live. I see its presence
to them. I am certified of a common nature; and so these other souls,
these separated selves, draw me as nothing else can. They stir in me
the new emotions we call passion; of love, hatred, fear, admiration,
pity; thence come conversation, competition, persuasion, cities and
war. Persons are supplementary to the primary teaching of the soul.
In youth we are mad for persons. Childhood and youth see all the
world in them. But the larger experience of man discovers the
identical nature appearing through them all. Persons themselves
acquaint us with the impersonal. In all conversation between two
persons tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common
nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is im-
personal; is God. And so in groups where debate is earnest, and
especially on great questions of thought, the company become aware
of their unity; aware that the thought rises to an equal height in
all bosoms, that all have a spiritual property in what was said, as well
as the sayer. They all wax wiser than they were. It arches over them
like a temple, this unity of thought in which every heart beats with
nobler sense of power and duty, and thinks and acts with unusual
solemnity. All are conscious of attaining to a higher self-possession.
It shines for all. There is a certain wisdom of humanity which is
common to the greatest men with the lowest, and which our ordinary
education often labors to silence and obstruct. The mind is one, and
THE OVER-SOUL 1 39
the best minds, who love truth for its own sake, think much less of
property in truth. Thankfully they accept it everywhere, and do not
label or stamp it with any man's name, for it is theirs long before-
hand. It is theirs from eternity. The learned and the studious of
thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction
in some degree disqualifies them to think truly. We owe many
valuable observations to people who are not very acute or profound,
and who say the thing without effort which we want and have long
been hunting in vain. The acdon of the soul is oftener in that which
is felt and left unsaid than in that which is said in any conversation.
It broods over every society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each
other. We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves,
and we know at the same time that we are much more. I feel the
same truth how often in my trivial conversation with my neighbors,
that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove
nods to Jove from behind each of us.
Men descend to meet. In their habitual and mean service to the
world, for which they forsake their native nobleness, they resemble
those Arabian sheiks who dwell in mean houses and effect an external
poverty, to escape the rapacity of the Pacha, and reserve all their dis-
play of wealth for their interior and guarded retirements.
As it is present in all persons, so it is in every period of hfe. It is
adult already in the infant man. In my dealing with my child, my
Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money stead me
nothing. They are all lost on him : but as much soul as I have, avails.
If I am merely wilful, he gives me a Rowland for an Oliver, sets his
will against mine, one for one, and leaves me, if I please, the degrada-
tion of beadng him by my superiority of strength. But if I renounce
my will and act for the soul, setting that up as umpire between us
two, out of his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loves
with me.
The soul is the perceiver and revealef of truth. We know truth
when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish
people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to
hear, "How do you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?"
We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we
are awake that we are awake. It was a grand sentence of Emanuel
140 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Swedenborg, which would alone indicate the greatness of that man's
perception, — "It is no proof of a man's understanding to be able to
affirm whatever he pleases; but to be able to discern that what is true
is true, and that what is false is false, this is the mark and character
of intelligence." In the book I read, the good thought returns to me,
as every truth will, the image of the whole soul. To the bad thought
which I find in it, the same soul becomes a discerning, separating
sword, and lops it away. We are wiser than we know. If we will not
interfere with our thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing
stands in God, we know the particular thing, and every thing, and
every man. For the Maker of all things and all persons stands behind
us and casts his dread omniscience through us over things.
But beyond this recognition of its own in particular passages of
the individual's experience, it also reveals truth. And here we should
seek to reinforce ourselves by its very presence, and to speak with a
worthier, loftier strain of that advent. For the soul's communication
of truth is the highest event in nature, for it then does not give some-
what from itself, but it gives itself, or passes into and becomes that
man whom it enlightens; or, in proportion to that truth he receives,
it takes him to itself.
We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations
of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These are always attended
by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx
of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual
rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life. Every distinct
apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with awe
and delight. A thrill passes through all men at the reception of new
truth, or at the performance of a great action, which comes out of the
heart of nature. In these communications the power to see is not
separated from the will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedi-
ence, and the obedience proceeds from a joyful perception. Every
moment when the individual feels himself invaded by it, is memor-
able. Always, I believe, by the necessity of our constitution a certain
enthusiasm attends the individual's consciousness of that divine
presence. The character and duration of this enthusiasm varies with
the state of the individual, from an exstasy and trance and prophetic
inspiration, — which is its rarer appearance, to the faintest glow of
THE OVER-SOUL I4I
virtuous emotion, in which form it warms, Uke our household fires,
all the families and associations of men, and makes society possible.
A certain tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of
the religious sense in men, as if "blasted with excess of light." The
trances of Socrates; the "union" of Plotinus; the vision of Porphyry;
the conversion of Paul; the aurora of Behmen; the convulsions of
George Fox and his Quakers; the illumination of Swedenborg, are
of this kind. What was in the case of these remarkable persons a
ravishment, has, in innumerable instances in common life, been
exhibited in less striking manner. Everywhere the history of religion
betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The rapture of the Moravian and
Quietist; the opening of the internal sense of the Word, in the lan-
guage of the New Jerusalem Church; the revival of the Calvinistic
churches; the experiences of the Methodists, are varying forms of that
shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul always
mingles with the universal soul.
The nature of these revelations is always the same; they are per-
ceptions of the absolute law. They are solutions of the soul's own
questions. They do not answer the questions which the understand-
ing asks. The soul answers never by words, but by the thing itself
that is inquired after.
Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular notion of a
revelation, is, that it is a teUing of fortunes. In past oracles of the
soul the understanding seeks to find answers to sensual questions,
and undertakes to tell from God how long men shall exist, what their
hands shall do and who shall be their company, adding even names
and dates and places. But we must pick no locks. We must check
this low curiosity. An answer in words is delusive; it is really no
answer to the questions you ask. Do not require a description of the
countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe
them to you, and to-morrow you arrive there and know them by
inhabiting them. Men ask of the immortality of the soul, and the
employments of heaven, and the state of the sinner, and so forth.
They even dream that Jesus has left replies to precisely these inter-
rogatories. Never a moment did that sublime spirit speak in their
patois. To truth, justice, love, the attributes of the soul, the idea
of immutableness is essentially associated. Jesus, living in these
142 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
moral sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes, heeding only the
manifestations of these, never made the separation of the idea of
duration from the essence of these attributes, never uttered a syllable
concerning the duration of the soul. It was left to his disciples to sever
duration from the moral elements, and to teach the immortality of
the soul as a doctrine, and maintain it by evidences. The moment
the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is already
fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility, there is
no question of continuance. No inspired man ever asks this question
or condescends to these evidences. For the soul is true to itself, and
the man in whom it is shed abroad cannot wander from the present,
which is infinite, to a future which would be finite.
These questions which we lust to ask about the future are a con-
fession of sin. God has no answer for them. No answer in words can
reply to a question of things. It is not in an arbitrary "decree of
God," but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts
of to-morrow: for the soul will not have us read any other cipher but
that of cause and effect. By this veil which curtains events it instructs
the children of men to live in to-day. The only mode of obtaining
an answer to these questions of the senses is to forego all low curi-
osity, and, accepting the tide of being which floats us into the secret
of nature, work and live, work and live, and all unawares the ad-
vancing soul has built and forged for itself a new condition, and the
question and the answer are one.
Thus is the soul the perceiver and revealer of truth. By the same
fire, serene, impersonal, perfect, which burns until it shall dissolve
all things into the waves and surges of an ocean of light, — we see and
know each other, and what spirit each is of. Who can tell the
grounds of his knowledge of the character of the several individuals
in his circle of friends? No man. Yet their acts and words do not
disappoint him. In that man, though he knew no ill of him, he put
no trust. In that other, though they had seldom met, authentic signs
had yet passed, to signify that he might be trusted as one who had
an interest in his own character. We know each other very well, —
which of us has been just to himself and whether that which we
teach or behold is only an aspiration or is our honest effort also.
We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis lies aloft in our
THE OVER-SOUL 1 43
life or unconscious power, not in the understanding. The whole
intercourse of society, its trade, its religion, its friendships, its quar-
rels, — is one wide judicial investigation of character. In full court,
or in small committee, or confronted face to face, accuser and
accused, men offer themselves to be judged. Against their will they
exhibit those decisive trifles by which character is read. But who
judges? and what? Not our understanding. We do not read them
by learning or craft. No; the wisdom of the wise man consists herein,
that he does not judge them; he lets them judge themselves and
merely reads and records their own verdict.
By virtue of this inevitable nature, private will is overpowered,
and, maugre our efforts or our imperfections, your genius will speak
from you, and mine from me. That which we are, we shall teach,
not voluntarily, but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our minds
through avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of
our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.
Character teaches over our head. The infallible index of true prog-
ress is found in the tone the man takes. Neither his age, nor his
breeding, nor company, nor books, nor actions, nor talents, nor all
together can hinder him from being deferential to a higher spirit
than his own. If he have not found his home in God, his manners,
his forms of speech, the turn of his sentences, the build, shall I say,
of all his opinions will involuntarily confess it, let him brave it out
how he will. If he have found his centre, the Deity vAW shine
through him, through all the disguises of ignorance, of ungenial
temperament, of unfavorable circumstance. The tone of seeking is
one, and the tone of having is another.
The great distinction between teachers sacred or literary; between
poets like Herbert, and poets like Pope; between philosophers like
Spinoza, Kant and Coleridge, — and philosophers like Locke, Paley,
Mackintosh and Stewart; between men of the world who are reck-
oned accomplished talkers, and here and there a fervent mystic,
prophesying half-insane under the infinitude of his thought, is that
one class speak from within, or from experience, as parties and
possessors of the fact; and the other class from without, as spectators
merely, or perhaps as acquainted with the fact on the evidence of
third persons. It is of no use to preach to me from without. I can do
144 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
that too easily myself. Jesus speaks always from within, and in a
degree that transcends all others. In that is the miracle. That in-
cludes the miracle. My soul believes beforehand that it ought so to
be. All men stand continually in the expectation of the appearance
of such a teacher. But if a man do not speak from within the veil,
where the word is one with that it tells of, let him lowly confess it.
The same Omniscience flows into the intellect and makes what we
call genius. Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the
most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame,
and are not writers. Among the multitude of scholars and authors
we feel no hallowing presence; we are sensible of a knack and skill
rather than of inspiration; they have a light and know not whence it
comes and call it their own : their talent is some exaggerated faculty,
some overgrown member, so that their strength is a disease. In these
instances the intellectual gifts do not make the impression of virtue,
but almost of vice; and we feel that a man's talents stand in the way
of his advancement in truth. But genius is religious. It is a larger
imbibing of the common heart. It is not anomalous, but more like
and not less like other men. There is in all great poets a wisdom of
humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise. The author,
the wit, the partisan, the fine gentleman, does not take place of the
man. Humanity shines in Homer, in Chaucer, in Spenser, in Shak-
speare, in Milton. They are content with truth. They use the posi-
tive degree. They seem frigid and phlegmatic to those who have
been spiced with the frantic passion and violent coloring of inferior
but popular writers. For, they are poets by the free course which they
allow to the informing soul, which through their eyes beholdeth
again and blesses the things which it hath made. The soul is superior
to its knowledge, wiser than any of its works. The great poet makes
us feel our own wealth, and then we think less of his compositions.
His greatest communication to our mind is to teach us to despise all
he has done. Shakspeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelli-
gent activity as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we
then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in
other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger
hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the
rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could
THE OVER-SOUL 1 45
utter things as good from day to day for ever. Why then should I
make account of Hamlet and Lear, as if we had not the soul from
which they fell as syllables from the tongue?
This energy does not descend into individual life on any other
condition than entire possession. It comes to the lowly and simple; it
comes to whomsoever will put off what is foreign and proud; it
comes as insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur. When we see
those whom it inhabits, we are apprised of new degrees of greatness.
From that inspiration the man comes back with a changed tone.
He does not talk with men with an eye to their opinion. He tries
them. It requires of us to be plain and true. The vain traveller
attempts to embellish his life by quoting my Lord and the Prince
and the Countess, who thus said or did to him. The ambitious
vulgar show you their spoons and brooches and rings, and preserve
their cards and compliments. The more cultivated, in their account
of their own experience, cull out the pleasing, poetic circumstance;
the visit to Rome, the man of genius they saw; the brilliant friend
they know; still further on perhaps the gorgeous landscape, the
mountain Ughts, the mountain thoughts they enjoyed yesterday, —
and so seek to throw a romantic color over their life. But the soul
that ascendeth to worship the great God is plain and true; has no rose
color; no fine friends; no chivalry; no adventures; does not want
admiration; dwells in the hour that now is, in the earnest experience
of the common day, — by reason of the present moment and the
mere trifle having become porous to thought and bibulous of the
sea of light.
Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks
like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be writ-
ten, yet are they so cheap and so things of course, that in the infinite
riches of the soul it is like gathering a few pebbles of? the ground, or
bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole
atmosphere are ours. The mere author in such society is like a pickr
pocket among gentlemen, who has come in to steal a gold button or
a pin. Nothing can pass there, or make you one of the circle, but the
casting aside your trappings and dealing man to man in naked truth,
plain confession and omniscient affirmation.
Souls such as these treat you as gods would, walk as gods in the
146 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
earth, accepting without any admiration your wit, your bounty, your
virtue even, say rather your act of duty, for your virtue they own as
their proper blood, royal as themselves, and overroyal, and the father
of the gods. But what rebuke their plain fraternal bearing casts on
the mutual flattery with which authors solace each other and wound
themselves! These flatter not. I do not wonder that these men go to
see Cromwell and Christina and Charles the II. and James I. and the
Grand Turk. For they are, in their own elevation, the fellows of
kings, and must feel the servile tone of conversation in the world.
They must always be a godsend to princes, for they confront them, a
king to a king, without ducking or concession, and give a high
nature the refreshment and satisfaction of resistance, of plain
humanity, of even companionship and of new ideas. They leave
them wiser and superior men. Souls like these make us feel that
sincerity is more excellent than flattery. Deal so plainly with man
and woman as to constrain the utmost sincerity and destroy all hope
of trifling with you. It is the highest compliment you can pay. Their
"highest praising," said Milton, "is not flattery, and their plainest
advice is a kind of praising."
Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul.
The simplest person who in his integrity worships God, becomes
God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self
is new and unsearchable. Ever it inspires awe and astonishment.
How dear, how soothing to man, arises the idea of God, peopling
the lonely place, effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappoint-
ments! When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from
our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence.
It is the doubling of the heart itself, nay, the infinite enlargement of
the heart with a power of growth to a new infinity on every side. It
inspires in man an infallible trust. He has not the conviction, but
the sight, that the best is the true, and may in that thought easily
dismiss all particular uncertainties and fears, and adjourn to the sure
revelation of time the solution of his private riddles. He is sure that
his welfare is dear to the heart of being. In the presence of law to his
mind he is overflowed with a reliance so universal that it sweeps
away all cherished hopes and the most stable projects of mortal con-
dition in its flood. He believes that he cannot escape from his good.
The things that are really for thee gravitate to thee. You are running
THE OVER-SOUL 1 47
to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not. If
you do not find him, will you not acquiesce that it is best you should
not find him? for there is a power, which as it is in you, is in him
also, and could therefore very well bring you together, if it were for
the best. You are preparing with eagerness to go and render a service
to which your talent and your taste invite you, the love of men and
the hope of fame. Has it not occurred to you that you have no right
to go, unless you are equally willing to be prevented from going?
O, beheve, as thou Hvest, that every sound that is spoken over the
round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear.
Every proverb, every book, every by-word that belongs to thee for
aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding
passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic will but the great
and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And
this because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a
wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood
rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the
water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.
Let men then learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to
his heart; this, namely; that the Highest dwells with him; that the
sources of nature are in his own mind, if the sentiment of duty is
there. But if he would know what the great God speaketh, he must
"go into his closet and shut the door," as Jesus said. God will not
make himself manifest to cowards. He must greatly listen to himself,
withdrawing himself from all the accents of other men's devotion.
Their prayers even are hurtful to him, until he have made his own.
Our religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever
the appeal is made, — no matter how indirectly, — to numbers, pro-
clamation is then and there made that religion is not. He that finds
God a sweet enveloping thought to him never counts his company.
When I sit in that presence, who shall dare to come in? When I
rest in perfect humility, when I burn with pure love, what can
Calvin or Swedenborg say ?
It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers or to one.
The faith that stands on authority is not faith. The reliance on
authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.
The position men have given to Jesus, now for many centuries of
history, is a position of authority. It characterizes themselves. It
148 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
cannot alter the eternal facts. Great is the soul, and plain. It is no
flatterer, it is no follower; it never appeals from itself. It always
believes in itself. Before the immense possibiUties of man all mere
experience, all past biography, however spotless and sainted, shrinks
away. Before that holy heaven which our presentiments foreshow
us, we cannot easily praise any form of life we have seen or read of.
We not only affirm that we have few great men, but, absolutely
speaking, that we have none; that we have no history, no record of
any character or mode of living that entirely contents us. The saints
and demigods whom history worships we are constrained to accept
with a grain of allowance. Though in our lonely hours we draw a
new strength out of their memory, yet, pressed on our attention, as
they are by the thoughtless and customary, they fatigue and invade.
The soul gives itself, alone, original and pure, to the Lonely, Original
and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads and speaks
through it. Then is it glad, young and nimble. It is not wise, but
it sees through all things. It is not called religious, but it is innocent.
It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass grows and the stone
falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, its nature. Behold, it
saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind. I, the imperfect,
adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul,
and thereby I do overlook the sun and the stars and feel them to be
but the fair accidents and effects which change and pass. More and
more the surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I become
public and human in my regards and actions. So come I to live in
thoughts and act with energies which are immortal. Thus revering
the soul, and learning, as the ancients said, that "its beauty is im-
mense," man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle
which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders;
he will learn that there is no profane history; that all history is
sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of
time. He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches,
but he will live with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base
and frivolous in his own life and be content with all places and any
service he can render. He will calmly front the morrow in the
negligency of that trust which carries God with it and so hath
already the whole future in the bottom of the heart.
CIRCLES
(1841)
THE eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the
second; and throughout nature this primary picture is re-
peated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher
of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle
whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. We
are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms.
One moral we have already deduced in considering the circular or
compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy we
shall now trace, that every action admits of being outdone. Our life
is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can
be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a begin-
ning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and
under every deep a lower deep opens.
This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable,
the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet,
at once the inspirer and the condemner of every success, may con-
veniently serve us to connect many illustrations of human power in
every department.
There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.
Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a
transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and
holds it fluid. Our culture is the predominance of an idea which
draws after it all this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise into
another idea; they will disappear. The Greek sculpture is all melted
away, as if it had been statues of ice : here and there a solitary figure
or fragment remaining, as we see flecks and scraps of snow left in
cold dells and mountain clefts in June and July. For the genius that
created it creates now somewhat else. The Greek letters last a little
longer, but are already passing under the same sentence and tumbling
149
150 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
into the inevitable pit which the creation o£ new thought opens for
all that is old. The new continents are built out of the ruins of an
old planet; the new races fed out of the decomposition of the forego-
ing. New arts destroy the old. See the investment of capital in aque-
ducts, made useless by hydraulics; fortifications, by gunpowder;
roads and canals, by railways; sails, by steam; steam, by electricity.
You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so many
ages. Yet a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which
builds is better than that which is built. The hand that built can
topple it down much faster. Better than the hand and nimbler was
the invisible thought which wrought through it; and thus ever,
behind the coarse effect, is a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen,
is itself the effect of a finer cause. Every thing looks permanent until
its secret is known. A rich estate appears to women and children a
firm and lasting fact; to a merchant, one easily created out of any ma-
terials, and easily lost. An orchard, good tillage, good grounds, seem
a fixture, like a gold mine, or a river, to a citizen; but to a large
farmer, not much more fixed than the state of the crop. Nature looks
provokingly stable and secular, but it has a cause like all the rest; and
when once I comprehend that, will these fields stretch so immovably
wide, these leaves hang so individually considerable ? Permanence is
a word of degrees. Every thing is medial. Moons are no more
bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls.
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though
he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which
all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him
a new idea which commands his own. The life of man is a self-
evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on
all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end.
The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel,
will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul. For it is
the inert effort of each thought, having formed itself into a circular
wave of circumstance, as for instance an empire, rules of an art, a
local usage, a religious rite, to heap itself on that ridge and to solidify
and hem in the life. But if the soul is quick and strong it bursts over
that boundary on all sides and expands another orbit on the great
deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to
CIRCLES 151
Stop and to bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first
and narrowest pulses it already tends outward with a vast force and
to immense and innumerable expansions.
Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every general
law only a particular fact of some more general law presendy to
disclose itself. There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumfer-
ence to us. The man finishes his story, — how good! how final! how
it puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo, on the other
side rises also a man and draws a circle around the circle we had
just pronounced the outline of the sphere. Then already is our first
speaker not man, but only a first speaker. His only redress is forth-
with to draw a circle outside of his antagonist. And so men do by
themselves. The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and cannot
be escaped, will presendy be abridged into a word, and the principle
that seemed to explain nature will itself be included as one example
of a bolder generalization. In the thought of to-morrow there is a
power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures of the
nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which no epic dream has yet
depicted. Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is
a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the
next age.
Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder; the steps are actions,
the new prospect is power. Every several result is threatened and
judged by that which follows. Every one seems to be contradicted
by the new; it is only limited by the new. The new statement is
always hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes
like an abyss of scepticism. But the eye soon gets wonted to it, for
the eye and it are effects of one cause; then its innocency and benefit
appear, and presently, all its energy spent, it pales and dwindles
before the revelation of the new hour.
Fear not the new generaHzation. Does the fact look crass and
material, threatening to degrade thy theory of spirit? Resist it not;
it goes to refine and raise thy theory of matter just as much.
There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness. Every
man supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is
any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it
can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel was
152 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
never opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable.
That is, every man beUeves that he has a greater possibiUty.
Our moods do not beheve in each other. To-day I am full of
thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should
not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow.
What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the
world: but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which
now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder
who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this
infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am
God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.
The continual effort to raise himself above himself, to work a pitch
above his last height, betrays itself in a man's relations. We thirst
for approbation, yet cannot forgive the approver. The sweet of
nature is love; yet if I have a friend I am tormented by my imperfec-
tions. The love of me accuses the other party. If he were high
enough to slight me, then could I love him, and rise by my affection
to new heights. A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his
friends. For every friend whom he loses for truth, he gains a better.
I thought as I walked in the woods and mused on my friends, why
should I play with them this game of idolatry ? I know and see too
well, when not voluntarily blind, the speedy limits of persons called
high and worthy. Rich, noble and great they are by the liberality of
our speech, but truth is sad. O blessed Spirit, whom I forsake for
these, they are not thee! Every personal consideration that we allow
costs us heavenly state. We sell the thrones of angels for a short and
turbulent pleasure.
How often must we learn this lesson? Men cease to interest us
when we find their limitations. The only sin is limitation. As soon
as you once come up with a man's limitations, it is all over with him.
Has he talents ? has he enterprises ? has he knowledge ? It boots not.
Infinitely alluring and attractive was he to you yesterday, a great
hope, a sea to swim in; now, you have found his shores, found it a
pond, and you care not if you never see it again.
Each new step we take in thought reconciles twenty seemingly
discordant facts, as expressions of one law. Aristotle and Plato are
reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see
CIRCLES 153
that Aristotle Platonizes. By going one step farther back in thought,
discordant opinions are reconciled by being seen to be two extremes
of one principle, and we can never go so far back as to preclude a
still higher vision.
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken
out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will
end. There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned to-
morrow; there is not any Uterary reputation, not the so-called eternal
names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very
hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the
manner and morals of mankind are all at the mercy of a new gener-
ahzation. Generalization is always a new influx of the divinity into
the mind. Hence the thrill that attends it.
Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot
have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where
you will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his
past apprehension of truth, and his alert acceptance of it from what-
ever quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to
society, his Christianity, his world, may at any time be superseded and
decease.
There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play with it aca-
demically, as the magnet was once a toy. Then we see in the heyday
of youth and poetry that it may be true, that it is true in gleams and
fragments. Then, its countenance waxes stern and grand, and we see
that it must be true. It now shows itself ethical and practical. We
learn that God is; that he is in me; and that all things are shadows
of him. The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the
idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact
that all nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organiz-
ing itself. Much more obviously is history and the state of the world
at any one time directly dependent on the intellectual classification
then existing in the minds of men. The things which are dear to
men at this hour are so on account of the ideas which have emerged
on their mental horizon, and which cause the present order of things,
as a tree bears its apples. A new degree of culture would instantly
revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits.
154 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the
termini which bound the common of silence on every side. The
parties are not to be judged by the spirit they partake and even ex-
press under this Pentecost. To-morrow they will have receded from
this high-water mark. To-morrow you shall find them stooping
under the old pack-saddles. Yet let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst
it glows on our walls. When each new speaker strikes a new light,
emancipates us from the oppression of the last speaker to oppress us
with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields
us to another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become
men. O, what truths profound and executable only in ages and orbs,
are supposed in the announcement of every truth! In common hours,
society sits cold and statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty, —
knowing, possibly, that we can be full, surrounded by mighty sym-
bols which are not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. Then
Cometh the god and converts the statues into fiery men, and by a flash
of his eye burns up the veil which shrouded all things, and the mean-
ing of the very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and
tester, is manifest. The facts which loomed so large in the fogs of
yesterday, — property, climate, breeding, personal beauty and the like,
have strangely changed their proportions. All that we reckoned
settled shakes and rattles; and literatures, cities, climates, religions,
leave their foundations and dance before our eyes. And yet here
again see the swift circumscription! Good as is discourse, silence is
better, and shames it. The length of the discourse indicates the dis-
tance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If they were
at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary
thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered.
Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal circle through which
a new one may be described. The use of literature is to afford us a
platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a pur-
chase by which we may move it. We fill ourselves with ancient learn-
ing, install ourselves the best we can in Greek, in Punic, in Roman
houses, only that we may wiselier see French, English and American
houses and modes of living. In like manner we see literature best
from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from
a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field.
CIRCLES 155
The astronomer must have his diameter of the earth's orbit as a base
to find the parallax of any star.
Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom
is not in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the
Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work
I incline to repeat my old steps, and do not believe in remedial force,
in the power of change and reform. But some Petrarch or Ariosto,
filled with the new wine of his imagination, writes me an ode or a
brisk romance, full of daring thought and action. He smites and
arouses me with his shrill tones, breaks up my whole chain of habits,
and I open my eye on my own possibilities. He claps wings to the
sides of all the solid old lumber of the world, and I am capable once
more of choosing a straight path in theory and practice.
We have the same need to command a view of the religion of the
world. We can never see Christianity from the catechism: — from the
pastures, from a boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-
birds we possibly may. Cleansed by the elemental Hght and wind,
steeped in the sea of beautiful forms which the field offers us, we may
chance to cast a right glance back upon biography. Christianity is
rightly dear to the best of mankind; yet was there never a young
philosopher whose breeding had fallen into the christian church by
whom that brave text of Paul's was not specially prized, "Then shall
also the Son be subject unto Him who put all things under him, that
God may be all in all." Let the claims and virtues of persons be never
so great and welcome, the instinct of man presses eagerly onward to
the impersonal and illimitable, and gladly arms itself against the dog-
matism of bigots with this generous word out of the book itself.
The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric
circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations
which apprize us that this surface on which we now stand is not
fixed, but sliding. These manifold tenacious qualities, this chemistry
and vegetation, these metals and animals, which seem to stand there
for their own sake, are means and methods only, are words of God,
and as fugitive as other words. Has the naturalist or chemist learned
his craft, who has explored the gravity of atoms and the elective
affinities, who has not yet discerned the deeper law whereof this is
only a partial or approximate statement, namely that like draws to
156 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
like, and that the goods which belong to you gravitate to you and
need not be pursued with pains and cost? Yet is that statement
approximate also, and not final. Omnipresence is a higher fact. Not
through subtle subterranean channels need friend and fact be drawn
to their counterpart, but, rightly considered, these things proceed
from the eternal generation of the soul. Cause and effect are two
sides of one fact.
The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call the
virtues, and extinguishes each in the light of a better. The great man
will not be prudent in the popular sense; all his prudence will be so
much deduction from his grandeur. But it behoves each to see, when
he sacrifices prudence, to what god he devotes it; if to ease and pleas-
ure, he had better be prudent still; if to a great trust, he can well
spare his mule and panniers who has a winged chariot instead. Geof-
frey draws on his boots to go through the woods, that his feet may be
safer from the bite of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril. In
many years neither is harmed by such an accident. Yet it seems to
me that with every precaution you take against such an evil you put
yourself into the power of the evil. I suppose that the highest prud-
ence is the lowest prudence. Is this too sudden a rushing from the
centre to the verge of our orbit? Think how many times we shall fall
back into pitiful calculations before we take up our rest in the great
sentiment, or make the verge of to-day the new centre. Besides, your
bravest sentiment is familiar to the humblest men. The poor and
the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as
well as you. "Blessed be nothing" and "The worse things are, the
better they are" are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of
common life.
One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's
ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly; as one beholds the same
objects from a higher point of view. One man thinks justice con-
sists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another
who is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously.
But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks him-
self which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the
poor? the debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind, of
genius to nature ? For you, O broker, there is no other principle but
CIRCLES 157
arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth
of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach
one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces
mechanically on the payment of moneys. Let me live onward; you
shall find that, though slower, the progress of my character will Uqui-
date all these debts without injustice to higher claims. If a man
should dedicate himself to the payment of notes, would not this be
injustice? Owes he no debt but money? And are all claims on him
to be postponed to a landlord's or a banker's ?
There is no virtue which is final; all are initial. The virtues of
society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery
that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed
such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.
Forgive his crimes, forgive his virtues too,
Those smaller faults, half converts to the right.
It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish our
contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness day
by day; but when these waves of God flow into me I no longer
reckon lost time. I no longer poorly compute my possible achieve-
ment by what remains to me of the month or the year; for these
moments confer a sort of omnipresence and omnipotence which asks
nothing of duration, but sees that the energy of the mind is
commensurate with the work to be done, without time.
And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim, you
have arrived at a fine pyrrhonism, at an equivalence and indifferency
of all actions, and would fain teach us that // we are true, forsooth,
our crimes may be lively stones out of which we shall construct the
temple of the true God.
I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am gladdened by seeing
the predominance of the saccharine principle throughout vegetable
nature, and not less by beholding in morals that unrestrained inun-
dation of the principle of good into every chink and hole that selfish-
ness has left open, yea into selfishness and sin itself; so that no evil
is pure, nor hell itself without its extreme satisfactions. But lest I
should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims,
let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not
158 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do
not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all
things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experi-
ment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.
Yet this incessant movement and progression which all things
partake could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some
principle of fixture or stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal genera-
tion of circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides. That central
life is somewhat superior to creation, superior to knowledge and
thought, and contains all its circles. For ever it labors to create a life
and thought as large and excellent as itself; but in vain.; for that
which is made instructs how to make a better.
Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things
renew, germinate and spring. Why should we import rags and relics
into the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the
only disease: all others run into this one. We call it by many names,
— fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime: they are all
forms of old age: they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia;
not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no
need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not
grow old, but grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with
religious eye looking upward, counts itself nothing and abandons it-
self to the instruction flowing from all sides. But the man and
woman of seventy assume to know all; throw up their hope; re-
nounce aspiration; accept the actual for the necessary and talk down
to the young. Let them then become organs of the Holy Ghost; let
them be lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted,
their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and
power. This old age ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature
every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten;
the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the
energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure
it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial
to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be setded:
only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to-day the mood, the
pleasure, the power of to-morrow, when we are building up our
CIRCLES 159
being. Of lower states, — of acts of routine and sense, we can tell
somewhat, but the masterpieces of God, the total growths and uni-
versal movements of the soul, he hideth; they are incalculable. I can
know that truth is divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I
can have no guess, for so to be is the sole inlet of so to \now. The
new position of the advancing man has all the powers of the old, yet
has them all new. It carries in its bosom all the energies of the past,
yet is itself an exhalation of the morning. I cast away in this new
moment all my once hoarded knowledge, as vacant and vain. Now
for the first time seem I to know any thing rightly. The simplest
words, — we do not know what they mean except when we love and
aspire.
The difference between talents and character is adroitness to keep
the old and trodden round, and power and courage to make a new
road to new and better goals. Character makes an overpowering
present, a cheerful, determined hour, which fortifies all the company
by making them see that much is possible and excellent that was not
thought of. Character dulls the impression of particular events.
When we see the conqueror we do not think much of any one battle
or success. We see that we had exaggerated the difficulty. It was easy
to him. The great man is not convulsible or tormentable. He is so
much that events pass over him without much impression. People
say sometimes, "See what I have overcome; see how cheerful I am;
see how completely I have triumphed over these black events." Not
if they still remind me of the black event, — they have not yet con-
quered. Is it conquest to be a gay and decorated sepulchre, or a half-
crazed widow, hysterically laughing? True conquest is the causing
the black event to fade and disappear as an early cloud of insignifi-
cant result in a history so large and advancing.
The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget
ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal
memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in
short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without
enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful. It is by abandonment.
The great moments of history are the faciHties of performance
through the strength of ideas, as the works of genius and religion.
"A man," said Oliver Cromwell, "never rises so high as when he
l6o RALPH WALDO EMERSON
knows not whither he is going." Dreams and drunkenness, the use
of opium and alcohol are the semblance and counterfeit of this
oracular genius, and hence their dangerous attraction for men. For
the like reason they ask the aid of wild passions, as in gaming and
war, to ape in some manner these flames and generosities of the
heart.
THE POET
(1844)
A moody child and wildly wise
Pursued the game with joyful eyes,
Which chose, like meteors, their way.
And rived the dark with private ray:
They overleapt the horizon's edge,
Searched with Apollo's privilege;
Through man, and woman, and sea, and star.
Saw the dance of nature forward far;
Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times.
Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.
Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below.
Which always find us young.
And always keep us so.
THOSE who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons
who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or
sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant;
but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether
their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and
sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry
wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their
knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or
some limited judgment of color or form, which is exercised for
amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doc-
trine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem
to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon
soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were put
into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried about; but there
is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, much less
is the latter the germination of the former. So in regard to other
161
1 62 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
forms, the intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependence
of the material world on thought and volition. Theologians think
it a pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a
cloud, of a city or a contract, but they prefer to come again to the
solid ground of historical evidence; and even the poets are contented
with a civil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems
from the fancy, at a safe distance from their own experience. But
the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the
double meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or
much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact: Orpheus,
Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and
the masters of sculpture, picture, and poetry. For we are not pans
and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but chil-
dren of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted,
and at two or three removes, when we know least about it. And
this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all this river of Time,
and its creatures, floweth, are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws
us to the consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet, or the
man of Beauty, to the means and materials he uses, and to the general
aspect of the art in the present time.
The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is representative.
He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises
us not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth. The young man
reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more him-
self than he is. They receive of the soul as he also receives, but they
more. Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from
their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He
is isolated among his contemporaries, by truth and by his art, but
with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men
sooner or later. For all men live by truth, and stand in need of
expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games,
we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself,
the other half is his expression.
Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate expres-
sion is rare. I know not how it is that we need an interpreter: but
the great majority of men seem to be minors, who have not yet come
into possession of their own, or mutes, who cannot report the conver-
THE POET 163
sation they have had with nature. There is no man who does not
anticipate a supersensual utiUty in the sun, and stars, earth, and
water. These stand and wait to render him a pecuUar service. But
there is some obstruction, or some excess of phlegm in our constitu-
tion, which does not suffer them to yield the due effect. Too feeble
fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch
should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist, that he could
report in conversation what had befallen him. Yet, in our experience,
the rays or appulses have sufficient force to arrive at the senses, but
not enough to reach the quick, and compel the reproduction of
themselves in speech. The poet is the person in whom these powers
are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles
that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience,
and its representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to
receive and to impart.
For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reap-
pear, under different names, in every system of thought, whether they
be called cause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto,
Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son; but
which we will call here, the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These
stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and
for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which he
is essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each
of these three has the power of the others latent in him, and his own
patent.
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a
sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted, or
adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made
some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe.
Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in
his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which
assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men,
and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that
some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to
the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose prov-
ince is action, but who quit it to imitate the sayers. But Homer's
words are as costly and admirable to Homer, as Agamemnon's
164 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
victories are to Agamemnon. The poet does not wait for the hero
or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes
primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others,
though primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and
servants; as sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as as-
sistants who bring building materials to an architect.
For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are
so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the
air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write
them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and sub-
stitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men
of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and
these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.
For nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is reasonable, and
must as much appear, as it must be done, or be known. Words and
deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy. Words are
also actions, and actions are a kind of words.
The sign and credentials of the poet are, that he announces that
which no man foretold. He is the true and only doctor; he knows
and tells; he is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy
to the appearance which he describes. He is a beholder of ideas, and
an utterer of the necessary and causal. For we do not speak now of
men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in metre, but of the
true poet. I took part in a conversation the other day, concerning a
recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind, whose head appeared
to be a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and whose skill,
and command of language, we could not sufficiently praise. But
when the question arose, whether he was not only a lyrist, but a poet,
we were obliged to confess that he is plainly a contemporary, not an
eternal man. He does not stand out of our low limitations, like a
Chimborazo under the line, running up from the torrid base through
all the climates of the globe, with belts of the herbage of every lati-
tude on its high and mottled sides; but this genius is the landscape-
garden of a modern house, adorned with fountains and statues, with
well-bred men and women standing and sitting in the walks and
terraces. We hear, through all the varied music, the ground-tone of
conventional life. Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not
THE POET 165
the children of music. The argument is secondary, the finish of the
verses is primary.
For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a
poem, — a thought so passionate and ahve, that, hke the spirit of a
plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns na-
ture with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the
order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the
form. The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to
unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the
richer in his fortune. For, the experience of each new age requires a
new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet, I
remember, when I was young, how much I was moved one morning
by tidings that genius had appeared in a youth who sat near me at
table. He had left his work, and gone rambling none knew whither,
and had written hundreds of lines, but could not tell whether that
which was in him was therein told: he could tell nothing but that
all was changed, — man, beast, heaven, earth, and sea. How gladly we
listened! how credulous! Society seemed to be compromised. We
sat in the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars. Bos-
ton seemed to be at twice the distance it had the night before, or was
much farther than that. Rome, — what was Rome? Plutarch and
Shakspeare were in the yellow leaf, and Homer no more should be
heard of. It is much to know that poetry has been written this very
day, under this very roof by your side. What! that wonderful spirit
has not expired! these stony moments are still sparkling and ani-
mated! I had fancied that the oracles were all silent, and nature had
spent her fires, and behold! all night, from every pore, these fine
auroras have been streaming. Every one has some interest in the
advent of the poet, and no one knows how much it may concern him.
We know that the secret of the world is profound, but who or what
shall be our interpreter, we know not. A mountain ramble, a new
style of face, a new person, may put the key into our hands. Of
course, the value of genius to us is in the veracity of its report. Talent
may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds. Mankind, in good
earnest, have availed so far in understanding themselves and theij
work, that the foremost watchman on the peak announces his news.
It is the truest word ever spoken, and the phrase will be the fittest.
1 66 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
most musical, and the unerring voice of the world for that time.
All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the
principal event in chronology. Man, never so often deceived, still
watches for the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a
truth, until he has made it his own. With what joy I begin to read a
poem, which I confide in as an inspiration. And now my chains are
to be broken; I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in
which I live, — opaque, though they seem transparent, — and from
the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my relations. That
will reconcile me to life, and renovate nature, to see trifles animated
by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will no more be
a noise; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by
which they may be discerned from fools and satans. This day shall
be better than my birthday: then I became an animal: now I am
invited into the science of the real. Such is the hope, but the fruition
is postponed. Oftener it falls, that this winged man, who will carry
me into the heaven, whirls me into the clouds, then leaps and frisks
about with me from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he is bound
heavenward; and I, being myself a novice, and slow in perceiving
that he does not know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent
that I should admire his skill to rise, like a fowl or a flying fish, a little
way from the ground or the water; but the all-piercing, all-feeding,
and ocular air of heaven, that man shall never inhabit. I tumble
down again soon into my old nooks, and lead the life of exaggera-
tions as before, and have lost my faith in the possibility of any guide
who can lead me thither where I would be.
But leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope, observe
how nature, by worthier impulses, has ensured the poet's fidelity to
his office of announcement and affirming, namely, by the beauty of
things, which becomes a new, and higher beauty, when expressed.
Nature offers all her creatures to him as a picture-language. Being
used as a type, a second wonderful value appears in the object, far
better than its old value, as the carpenter's stretched cord, if you
hold your ear close enough, is musical in the breeze.
"Things more excellent than every image," says Jamblichus, "are
expressed through images." Things admit of being used as sym-
bols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part.
THE POET 167
Every line we can draw in the sand, has expression; and there is
no body without its spirit of genius. Ail form is an effect of char-
acter; all condition, of the quahty of hfe; all harmony, of health;
(and for this reason, a perception of beauty should be sympathetic,
or proper only to the good) . The beautiful rests on the foundations
of the necessary. The soul makes the body, as the wise Spenser
teaches : —
So every spirit, as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight,
With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
For, of the soul, the body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make.
Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical speculation, but
in a holy place, and should go very warily and reverently. We
stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes
into Appearance, and Unity into Variety.
The Universe is the externization of the soul. Wherever the Hfe
is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual,
and therefore superficial. The earth, and the heavenly bodies, phys-
ics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent;
but these are the retinue of that Being we have. "The mighty
heaven," said Proclus, "exhibits, in its transfigurations, clear images
of the splendor of intellectual perceptions; being moved in conjunc-
tion with the unapparent periods of intellectual natures." Therefore,
science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keep-
ing step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an
index of our self-knowledge. Since every thing in nature answers
to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is
that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.
No wonder, then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over
them with a religious regard. The beauty of the fable proves the
importance of the sense; to the poet, and to all others; or if you
please, every man is so far a poet as to be susceptible of these en-
chantments of nature: for all men have the thoughts whereof the
universe is the celebration. I find that the fascination resides in the
1 68 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
symbol. Who loves nature? Who does not? Is it only poets, and
men of leisure and cultivation, who live with her? No; but also
hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though they express their
affection in their choice of life, and not in their choice of words.
The writer wonders what the coachman or the hunter values in
riding, in horses, and dogs. It is not superficial qualities. When
you talk with him, he holds these at as slight a rate as you. His
worship is sympathetic; he has no definitions, but he is commanded
in nature, by the living power which he feels to be there present.
No imitation, or playing of these things, would content him; he
loves the earnest of the northwind, of rain, of stone, and wood, and
iron. A beauty not explicable, is dearer than a beauty which we can
see to the end of. It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the super-
natural, body overflowed by life, which he worships, with coarse,
but sincere rites.
The inwardness and mystery of this attachment, drives men of
every class to the use of emblems. The schools of poets, and philos-
ophers, are not more intoxicated with their symbols, than the popu-
lace with theirs. In our political parties, compute the power of
badges and emblems. See the great ball which they roll from
Baltimore to Bunker Hill! In the political processions, Lowell goes
in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Witness the
cider-barrel, the log cabin, the hickory-stick, the palmetto, and all
the cognizances of party. See the power of national emblems. Some
stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other figure,
which came into credit God knows how, on an old rag of bunting,
blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the ends of the earth, shall make
the blood tingle under the rudest, or the most conventional exterior.
The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and
mystics!
Beyond this universality of the symbolic language, we are apprised
of the divineness of this superior use of things, whereby the world
is a temple, whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures, and
commandments of the Deity, in this, that there is no fact in nature
which does not carry the whole sense of nature; and the distinctions
which we make in events, and in affairs, of low and high, honest
and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol. Thought
THE POET 169
makes every thing fit for use. The vocabulary of an omniscient
man would embrace words and images excluded from polite con-
versation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene,
becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connection of thought. The
piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circum-
cision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and
offensive. Small and mean things serve as well as great symbols.
The meaner the type by which a law is expressed, the more pungent
it is, and the more lasting in the memories of men: just as we choose
the smallest box, or case, in which any needful utensil can be carried.
Bare lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and
excited mind; as it is related of Lord Chatham, that he was accus-
tomed to read in Bailey's Dictionary, when he was preparing to
speak in Parliament. The poorest experience is rich enough for all
the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a knowledge of
new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few
actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We
are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols
we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.
It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once
a poem. Every new relation is a new word. Also, we use defects
and deformities to a sacred purpose, so expressing our sense that
the evils of the world are such only to the evil eye. In the old
mythology, mythologists observe, defects are ascribed to divine
natures, as lameness to Vulcan, blindness to Cupid, and the like, to
signify exuberances.
For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God, that
makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and
the Whole, — re-attaching even artificial things and violations of
nature, to nature, by a deeper insight — disposes very easily of the
most disagreeable facts. Readers of poetry see the factory-village,
and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken
up by these; for these works of art are not yet consecrated in their
readings; but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less
than the bee-hive, or the spider's geometrical web. Nature adopts
them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars
she loves like her own. Besides, in a centred mind, it signifies
lyO RALPH WALDO EMERSON
nothing how many mechanical inventions you exhibit. Though you
add milhons, and never so surprising, the fact of mechanics has
not gained a grain's weight. The spiritual fact remains unalterable,
by many or by few particulars; as no mountain is of any appreci-
able height to break the curve of the sphere. A shrewd country-boy
goes to the city for the first time, and the complacent citizen is not
satisfied with his litde wonder. It is not that he does not see all the
fine houses, and know that he never saw such before, but he dis-
poses of them as easily as the poet finds place for the railway. The
chief value of the new fact, is to enhance the great and constant
fact of Life, which can dwarf any and every circumstance, and to
which the belt of wampum, and the commerce of America, are
alike.
The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun,
the poet is he who can articulate it. For, though life is great, and
fascinates, and absorbs, — and though all men are intelligent of the
symbols through which it is named, — yet they cannot originally use
them. We are symbols, and inhabit symbols; workman, work, and
tools, words and things, birth and death, all are emblems; but we
sympathize with the symbols, and, being infatuated with the eco-
nomical uses of things, we do not know that they are thoughts.
The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them a power
which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue
into every dumb and inanimate object. He perceives the independ-
ence of the thought on the symbol, the stability of the thought,
the accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncsus
were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to
glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. For,
through that better perception, he stands one step nearer to things,
and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is
multiform; that within the form of every creature is a force impelling
it to ascend into a higher form; and, following with his eyes the life,
uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with
the flowing of nature. All the facts of the animal economy, sex,
nutriment, gestation, birth, growth, are symbols of the passage of
the world into the soul of man, to suffer there a change, and
reappear a new and higher fact. He uses forms according to the life,
THE POET 171
and not according to the form. This is true science. The poet alone
knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does
not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why
the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we
call suns, and moons, and stars; why the great deep is adorned
with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he
rides on them as the horses of thought.
By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-
maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes
after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not
another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detach-
ment or boundary. The poets made all the words, and therefore
language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort
of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words
is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained
currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the
first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest
word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.
As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the
shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes,
which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us
of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees
it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expression
or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first,
as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature, is a certain self-regu-
lated motion, or change; and nature does all things by her own
hands, and does not leave another to baptize her, but baptizes her-
self; and this through the metamorphosis again. I remember that
a certain poet described it to me thus:
Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of things, whether
wholly or partly of a material and finite kind. Nature through all
her kingdoms, insures herself. Nobody cares for planting the poor
fungus: so she shakes down from the gills of one agaric countless
spores, any one of which, being preserved, transmits new billions of
spores to-morrow or next day. The new agaric of this hour has a
chance which the old one had not. This atom of seed is thrown
172 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
into a new place, not subject to the accidents which destroyed its
parent two rods off. She makes a man; and having brought him
to ripe age, she will no longer run the risk of losing this wonder
at a blow, but she detaches from him a new self, that the kind may
be safe from accidents to which the individual is exposed. So when
the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought she detaches
and sends away from it its poems or songs, — a fearless, sleepless,
deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the
weary kingdom of time: a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with
wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which they came),
which carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecoverably into the
hearts of men. These wings are the beauty of the poet's soul. The
songs, thus flying immortal from their mortal parent, are pursued
by clamorous flights of censures, which swarm in far greater num-
bers, and threaten to devour them; but these last are not winged.
At the end of a very short leap they fall plump down, and rot,
having received from the souls out of which they came no beautiful
wings. But the melodies of the poet ascend, and leap, and pierce
into the deeps of infinite time.
So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech. But nature has
a higher end, in the production of new individuals, than security,
namely, ascension, or the passage of the soul into higher forms. I
knew, in my younger days, the sculptor who made the statue of the
youth which stands in the public garden. He was, as I remember,
unable to tell directly, what made him happy, or unhappy, but
by wonderful indirections he could tell. He rose one day, according
to his habit, before the dawn, and saw the morning break, grand
as the eternity out of which it came, and, for many days after, he
strove to express this tranquillity, and lo! his chisel had fashioned
out of marble the form of a beautiful youth. Phosphorus, whose
aspect is such, that, it is said, all persons who look on it become
silent. The poet also resigns himself to his mood, and that thought
which agitated him is expressed, but alter idem in a manner totally
new. The expression is organic, or, the new type which things them-
selves take when liberated. As, in the sun, objects paint their images
on the retina of the eye, so they, sharing the aspiration of the whole
THE POET 173
universe, tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their essence in
his mind. Like the metamorphosis of things into higher organic
forms, is their change into melodies. Over every thing stands its
daemon, or soul, and, as the form of the thing is reflected by the eye,
so the soul of the thing is reflected by a melody. The sea, the
mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre-exist, or super-
exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like odors in the air, and when
any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them, and
endeavors to write down the notes, without diluting or depraving
them. And herein is the legitimation of criticism, in the mind's
faith, that the poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature,
with which they ought to be made to tally. A rhyme in one of our
sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a
sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers. The
pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a tempest
is a rough ode, without falsehood or rant: a summer, with its
harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinating
how many admirably executed parts. Why should not the sym-
metry and truth that modulate these, glide into our spirits, and
we participate the invention of nature?
This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination,
is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by
the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or
circuit of things through forms, and making them translucid to
others. The path of things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to
go with them? A spy they will not suffer; a lover, a poet, is the
transcendency of their own nature, — him they will suffer. The
condition of true naming, on the poet's part, is his resigning himself
to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and accompanying
that.
It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that,
beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is
capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by
abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of
power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on
which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors,
and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him:
174 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
then he is caught up into the Ufe of the Universe, his speech is
thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible
as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks ad-
equately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, "with
the flower of the mind;" not with the intellect, used as an organ,
but with the intellect released from all service, and suffered to take
its direction from its celestial life; or, as the ancients were wont to
express themselves, not with intellect alone, but with the intellect
inebriated by nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way, throws
his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal
to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries
us through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this
instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows
into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis
is possible.
This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee,
tea, opium, the fumes of sandalwood and tobacco, or whatever other
species of animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of such
means as they can, to add this extraordinary power to their normal
powers; and to this end they prize conversation, music, pictures,
sculpture, dancing, theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires, gaming,
politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxication, which are several
coarser or finer ^M2i-/-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar,
which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming nearer to the
fact. These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of a man, to
his passage out into free space, and they help him to escape the
custody of that body in which he is pent up, and of that jail-yard
of individual relations in which he is enclosed. Hence a great num-
ber of such as were professionally expressors of Beauty, as painters,
poets, musicians, and actors, have been more than others wont to
lead a life of pleasure and indulgence; all but the few who received
the true nectar; and, as it was a spurious mode of obtaining free-
dom, an emancipation not into the heavens, but into the freedom
of baser places, they were punished for that advantage they won, by
a dissipation and deterioration. But never can any advantage be
taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm
presence of the creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium
THE POET 175
or of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul
in a clean and chaste body. That is not an inspiration which we
owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit excitement and fury. Milton
says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the
epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men,
must drink water out of a wooden bowl.
For poetry is not "Devil's wine," but God's wine. It is with this
as it is with toys. We fill the hands and nurseries of our children
with all manner of dolls, drums, and horses, withdrawing their eyes
from the plain face and sufficing object of nature, the sun, and moon,
the animals, the water, and stones, which should be their toys. So
the poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low and plain,
that the common influences should deUght him. His cheerfulness
should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his
inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water. That spirit which
suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every
dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump, and half-imbedded
stone, on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor
and hungry, and such as are of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain
with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and
wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou
shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pine-
woods.
If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other
men. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy.
The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and
exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched by a wand, which
makes us dance and run about happily, Hke children. We are like
persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is
the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets
are thus Hberating gods. Men have really got a new sense, and
found within their world, another world or nest of worlds; for the
metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not stop. I will
not now consider how much this makes the charm of algebra and
the mathematics, which also have their tropes, but it is felt in every
definition; as, when Aristotle defines space to be an immovable
vessel, in which things are contained; — or, when Plato defines a
176 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
line to be a flowing point; or, figure to be a bound of solid; and
many the like. What a joyful sense of freedom we have, when
Vitruvius announces the old opinion of artists, that no architect
can build any house well, who does not know something of anatomy.
When Socrates, in Charmides, tells us that the soul is cured of its
maladies by certain incantations, and that these incantations are
beautiful reasons, from which temperance is generated in souls;
when Plato calls the world an animal; and Timaeus affirms that
the plants also are animals; or affirms a man to be a heavenly tree,
growing with his root, which is his head, upward; and, as George
Chapman, following him, writes, —
So in our tree of man, whose nervie root
Springs in his top;
when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as "that white flower which
marks extreme old age;" when Proclus calls the universe the statue
of the intellect; when Chaucer, in his praise of "Gentilesse," com-
pares good blood in mean condition to fire, which, though carried
to the darkest house betwixt this and the mount of Caucasus, will
yet hold its natural office, and burn as bright as if twenty thousand
men did it behold; when John saw, in the apocalypse, the ruin of the
world through evil, and the stars fall from heaven, as the figtree
casteth her untimely fruit; when ^sop reports the whole catalogue
of common daily relations through the masquerade of birds and
beasts; — we take the cheerful hint of the immortality of our essence,
and its versatile habit and escapes, as when the gypsies say, "it is
vain to hang them, they cannot die."
The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient British bards had
for the title of their order, "Those who are free throughout the
world." They are free, and they make free. An imaginative book
renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through
its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of
the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the
transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried
away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors
and the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him
like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the
THE POET 177
arguments and histories and criticism. All the value which attaches
to Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Swe-
denborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who introduces questionable
facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic, astrology, palm-
istry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we have of departure
from routine, and that here is a new witness. That also is the
best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the
world like a ball, in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then
seems; how mean to study, when an emotion communicates to the
intellect the power to sap and upheave nature: how great the
perspective! nations, times, systems, enter and disappear like threads
in tapestry of large figure and many colors; dream delivers us to
dream, and, while the drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed, our
philosophy, our religion, in our opulence.
There is good reason why we should prize this liberation. T'he
fate of the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm,
perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an
emblem of the state of man. On the brink of the waters of life and
truth, we are miserably dying. The inaccessibleness of every thought
but that we are in, is wonderful. What if you come near to it, —
you are as remote, when you are nearest, as when you are farthest.
Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison. There-
fore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an
ode, or in an action, or in looks and behavior, has yielded us a
new thought. He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new
scene.
This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power to impart it,
as it must come from greater depth and scope of thought, is a meas-
ure of intellect. Therefore all books of the imagination endure, all
which ascend to that truth, that the writer sees nature beneath him,
and uses it as his exponent. Every verse or sentence, possessing this
virtue, will take care of its own immortality. The religions of the
world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.
But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze.
The poet did not stop at the color, or the form, but read their mean-
ing; neither may he rest in this meaning; but he makes the same
objects exponents of his new thought. Here is the difference
178 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one
sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes
old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehic-
ular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for con-
veyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism
consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for
an universal one. The morning-redness happens to be the favorite
meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behman, and comes to stand to him
for truth and faith; and he believes should stand for the same
realities to every reader. But the first reader prefers as naturally
the symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or
a jeweller polishing a gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more,
are equally good to the person to whom they are significant. Only
they must be held lightly, and be very willingly translated into the
equivalent terms which others use. And the mystic must be steadily
told, — All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of
that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this
trite rhetoric, — universal signs, instead of these village symbols,
— and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems
to show, that all reUgious error consisted in making the symbol too
stark and soUd, and, at last, nothing but an excess of the organ of
language.
Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands eminently for
the translator of nature into thought. I do not know the man in
history to whom things stood so uniformly for words. Before him
the metamorphosis continually plays. Every thing on which his
eye rests, obeys the impulses of moral nature. The figs become
grapes whilst he eats them. When some of his angels affirmed a
truth, the laurel twig which they held blossomed in their hands.
The noise which, at a distance, appeared like gnashing and thump-
ing, on coming nearer was found to be the voice of disputants.
The men, in one of his visions, seen in heavenly light, appeared
like dragons, and seemed in darkness: but, to each other, they
appeared as men, and, when the light from heaven shone into their
cabin, they complained of the darkness, and were compelled to shut
the window that they might see.
There was this perception in him, which makes the poet or seer.
THE POET 179
an object of awe and terror, namely, that the same man, or society
of men, may wear one aspect to themselves and their companions,
and a different aspect to higher intelligences. Certain priests, whom
he describes as conversing very learnedly together, appeared to the
children, who were at some distance, like dead horses: and many
the like misappearances. And instantly the mind inquires, whether
these fishes under the bridge, yonder oxen in the pasture, those
dogs in the yard, are immutably fishes, oxen, and dogs, or only so
appear to me, and perchance to themselves appear upright men;
and whether I appear as a man to all eyes. The Brahmins and
Pythagoras propounded the same question, and if any poet has wit-
nessed the transformation, he doubtless found it in harmony with
various experiences. We have all seen changes as considerable in
wheat and caterpillars. He is the poet, and shall draw us with love
and terror, who sees, through the flowing vest, the firm nature, and
can declare it.
I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not, with
sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to
life, nor dare we chant our own times and social circumstance. If
we filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink from celebrat-
ing it. Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely
man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await.
Dante's praise is, that he dared to write his autobiography in colossal
cipher, or into universality. We have yet had no genius in America,
with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable
materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times,
another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires
in Homer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism. Banks and
tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, methodism and unitarianism, are
flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of
wonder as the town of Troy, and the temple of Delphos, and are
as swiftly passing away. Our logrolling, our stumps and their poli-
tics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boats, and our re-
pudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest
men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing,
Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in
our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will
l8o RALPH WALDO EMERSON
not wait long for metres. If I have not found that excellent com-
bination of gifts in my countrymen which I seek, neither could
I aid myself to fix the idea of the poet by reading now and then
in Chalmers's collection of five centuries of English poets. These
are wits, more than poets, though there have been poets among
them. But when we adhere to the ideal of the poet, we have our
difficulties even with Milton and Homer. Milton is too literary,
and Homer too literal and historical.
But I am not wise enough for a national criticism, and must see
the old largeness a little longer, to discharge my errand from the
muse to the poet concerning his art.
Art is the path of the creator to his work. The paths, or methods,
are ideal and eternal, though few men ever see them, not the artist
himself for years, or for a lifetime, unless he come into the condi-
tions. The painter, the sculptor, the composer, the epic rhapsodist,
the orator, all partake one desire, namely, to express themselves
symmetrically and abundantly, not dwarfishly and fragmentarily.
They found or put themselves in certain conditions, as, the painter
and sculptor before some impressive human figures; the orator, into
the assembly of the people; and the others, in such scenes as each
has found exciting to his intellect; and each presently feels the new
desire. He hears a voice, he sees a beckoning. Then he is apprised,
with wonder, what herds of daemons hem him in. He can no more
rest; he says, with the old painter, "By God, it is in me, and must
go forth of me." He pursues a beauty, half seen, which flies before
him. The poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of the
things he says are conventional, no doubt; but by and by he says
something which is original and beautiful. That charms him. He
would say nothing else but such things. In our way of talking, we
say, "That is yours, this is mine;" but the poet knows well that it is
not his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you; he
would fain hear the like eloquence at length. Once having tasted
this immortal ichor, he cannot have enough of it, and, as an ad-
mirable creative power exists in these intellections, it is of the last
importance that these things get spoken. What a little of all we
know is said! What drops of all the sea of our science are baled up!
and by what accident it is that these are exposed, when so many
THE POET lOl
secrets sleep in nature! Hence the necessity of speech and song;
hence these throbs and heart-beatings in the orator, at the door of
the assembly, to the end, namely, that thought may be ejaculated
as Logos, or Word.
Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, "It is in me, and shall out."
Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed
and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of thee
that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a
power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which
a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. Nothing
walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise
and walk before him as exponent of his meaning. Comes he to
that power, his genius is no longer exhaustible. All the creatures,
by pairs and by tribes, pour into his mind as into a Noah's ark, to
come forth again to people a new world. This is like the stock of
air for our respiration, or for the combustion of our fireplace, not a
measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if wanted. And there-
fore the rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Raphael,
have obviously no limits to their works, except the limits of their
lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready
to render an image of every created thing.
O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and
not in castles, or by the sword-blade, any longer. The conditions
are hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the
muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs,
graces, poHtics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the
muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal
chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding
tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God
wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that
thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy
gentlemen, and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for
thee; others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou
shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the
Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and
apprenticeships, and this is thine: thou must pass for a fool and a
churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which
1 82 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known
only to thine own, and they shall console thee with tenderest love.
And thou shalt not be able to rehearse the names o£ thy friends in
thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. And this is the
reward: that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of
the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not
troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole
land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation,
without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt
own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants
and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever
snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night
meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or
sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries,
wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and
awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee,
and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be
able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.
CHARACTER
(1844)
The sun set; but set not his hope:
Stars rose; his faith was earher up:
Fixed on the enormous galaxy,
Deeper and older seemed his eye:
And matched his sufferance sublime
The taciturnity of time.
He spoke, and words more soft than rain
Brought the Age of Gold again:
His action won such reverence sweet.
As hid all measure of the feat.
Work of his hand
He nor commends nor grieves:
Pleads for itself the fact;
As unrepenting Nature leaves
Her every act.
I HAVE read that those who listened to Lord Chatham felt that
there was something finer in the man, than anything which
he said. It has been complained of our brilliant English his-
torian of the French Revolution, that when he has told all his facts
about Mirabeau, they do not justify his estimate of his genius.
The Gracchi, Agis, Cleomenes, and others of Plutarch's heroes, do
not in the record of facts equal their own fame. Sir Philip Sidney,
the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh, are men of great figure, and
of few deeds. We cannot find the smallest part of the personal
weight of Washington, in the narrative of his exploits. The author-
ity of the name of Schiller is too great for his books. This inequality
of the reputation to the works or the anecdotes is not accounted for
by saying that the reverberation is longer than the thunder-clap; but
somewhat resided in these men which begot an expectation that
outran all their performance. The largest part of their power was
latent. This is that which we call Character, — a reserved force which
183
184 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
acts directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived of as
a certain undemonstrable force, a Familiar or Genius, by whose
impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart;
which is company for him, so that such men are often solitary, or
if they chance to be social, do not need society, but can entertain
themselves very well alone. The purest literary talent appears at
one time great, at another time small, but character is of a stellar
and undiminishable greatness. What others effect by talent or by
eloquence this man accomplishes by some magnetism. "Half his
strength he put not forth." His victories are by demonstration of
superiority, and not by crossing of bayonets. He conquers, because
his arrival alters the face of affairs. "'O lole! how did you know
that Hercules was a god?' 'Because,' answered lole, 'I was content
the moment my eyes fell on him. When I beheld Theseus, I de-
sired that I might see him offer battle, or at least guide his horses
in the chariot-race; but Hercules did not wait for a contest; he
conquered whether he stood, or walked, or sat, or whatever thing
he did.' " Man, ordinarily a pendant to events, only half attached,
and that awkwardly, to the world he lives in, in these examples
appears to share the life of things, and to be an expression of the
same laws which control the tides and the sun, numbers and quan-
tities.
But to use a more modest illustration, and nearer home, I observe,
that in our political elections, where this element, if it appears at all,
can only occur in its coarsest form, we sufficiently understand its
incomparable rate. The people know that they need in their repre-
sentative much more than talent, namely, the power to make his
talent trusted. They cannot come at their ends by sending to Con-
gress a learned, acute, and fluent speaker, if he be not one, who,
before he was appointed by the people to represent them, was ap-
pointed by Almighty God to stand for a fact, — invincibly persuaded
of that fact in himself, — so that the most confident and the most
violent persons learn that here is resistance on which both impudence
and terror are wasted, namely, faith in a fact. The men who carry
their points do not need to inquire of their constituents what they
should say, but are themselves the country which they represent:
nowhere are its emotions or opinions so instant and true as in them;
CHARACTER 1 85
nowhere so pure from a selfish infusion. The constituency at home
hearkens to their words, watches the color of their cheek, and there-
in, as in a glass, dresses its own. Our public assemblies are pretty
good tests of manly force. Our frank countrymen of the west and
south have a taste for character, and like to know whether the
New Englander is a substantial man, or whether the hand can pass
through him.
The same motive force appears in trade. There are geniuses in
trade, as well as in war, or the state, or letters; and the reason why
this or that man is fortunate, is not to be told. It lies in the man:
that is all anybody can tell you about it. See him, and you will
know as easily why he succeeds, as, if you see Napoleon, you would
comprehend his fortune. In the new objects we recognize the old
game, the habit of fronting the fact, and not dealing with it at
second-hand, through the perceptions of somebody else. Nature
seems to authorize trade, as soon as you see the natural merchant,
who appears not so much a private agent, as her factor and Minister
of Commerce. His natural probity combines with his insight into
the fabric of society, to put him above tricks, and he communicates
to all his own faith, that contracts are of no private interpretation.
The habit of his mind is a reference to standards of natural equity
and public advantage; and he inspires respect, and the wish to deal
with him, both for the quiet spirit of honor which attends him,
and for the intellectual pastime which the spectacle of so much
ability affords. This immensely stretched trade, which makes the
capes of the Southern Ocean his wharves, and the Atlantic Sea his
familiar port, centres in his brain only; and nobody in the universe
can make his place good. In his parlor, I see very well that he has
been at hard work this morning, with that knitted brow, and that
settled humor, which all his desire to be courteous cannot shake off.
I see plainly how many firm acts have been done; how many valiant
noes have this day been spoken, when others would have uttered
ruinous yeas. I see, with the pride of art, and skill of masterly
arithmetic and power of remote combination, the consciousness of
being an agent and playfellow of the original laws of the world.
He too believes that none can supply him, and that a man must
be born to trade, or he cannot learn it.
1 86 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
This virtue draws the mind more, when it appears in action to
ends not so mixed. It works with most energy in the smallest com-
panies and in private relations. In all cases, it is an extraordinary
and incomputable agent. The excess o£ physical strength is para-
lyzed by it. Higher natures overpower lower ones by affecting them
with a certain sleep. The faculties are locked up, and ofler no
resistance. Perhaps that is the universal law. When the high cannot
bring up the low to itself, it benumbs it, as man charms down the
resistance of the lower animals. Men exert on each other a similar
occult power. How often has the influence of a true master realized
all the tales of magic! A river of command seemed to run down
from his eyes into all those who beheld him, a torrent of strong
sad light, like an Ohio or Danube, which pervaded them with his
thoughts, and colored all events with the hue of his mind. "What
means did you employ?" was the question asked of the wife of
Concini, in regard to her treatment of Mary of Medici; and the
answer was, "Only that influence which every strong mind has over
a weak one." Cannot Caesar in irons shuffle off the irons, and trans-
fer them to the person of Hippo or Thraso the turnkey ? Is an iron
handcuff so immutable a bond? Suppose a slaver on the coast of
Guinea should take on board a gang of negroes, which should
contain persons of the stamp of Toussaint L'Ouverture: or, let us
fancy, under these swarthy masks he has a gang of Washingtons
in chains. When they arrive at Cuba, will the relative order of the
ship's company be the same? Is there nothing but rope and iron?
Is there no love, no reverence? Is there never a glimpse of right
in a poor slave-captain's mind; and cannot these be supposed avail-
able to break, or elude, or in any manner overmatch the tension of
an inch or two of iron ring?
This is a natural power, like light and heat, and all nature
cooperates with it. The reason why we feel one man's presence, and
do not feel another's, is as simple as gravity. Truth is the summit
of being: justice is the application of it to affairs. All individual
natures stand in a scale, according to the purity of this element in
them. The will of the pure runs down from them into other natures,
as water runs down from a higher into a lower vessel. This natural
force is no more to be withstood, than any other natural force. We
CHARACTER 1 87
can drive a stone upward for a moment into the air, but it is yet
true that all stones will forever fall; and whatever instances can
be quoted of unpunished theft, or of a lie which somebody credited,
justice must prevail, and it is the privilege of truth to make itself
believed. Character is this moral order seen through the medium
of an individual nature. An individual is an encloser. Time and
space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no
longer. Now, the universe is a close or pound. All things exist in
the man tinged with the manners of his soul. With what quality
is in him, he infuses all nature that he can reach; nor does he
tend to lose himself in vastness, but, at how long a curve soever,
all his regards return into his own good at last. He animates all
he can, and he sees only what he animates. He encloses the world,
as the patriot does his country, as a material basis for his character,
and a theatre for action. A healthy soul stands united with the
Just and the True, as the magnet arranges itself with the pole, so
that he stands to all beholders like a transparent object betwixt
them and the sun, and whoso journeys towards the sun, journeys
towards that person. He is thus the medium of the highest influence
to all who are not on the same level. Thus men of character are
the conscience of the society to which they belong.
The natural measure of this power is the resistance of circum-
stances. Impure men consider life as it is reflected in opinions,
events, and persons. They cannot see the action, until it is done.
Yet its moral element pre-existed in the actor, and its quality as
right or wrong, it was easy to predict. Everything in nature is
bipolar, or has a positive and negative pole. There is a male and a
female, a spirit and a fact, a north and a south. Spirit is the positive,
the event is the negative. Will is the north, action the south pole.
Character may be ranked as having its natural place in the north.
It shares the magnetic currents of the system. The feeble souls are
drawn to the south or negative pole. They look at the profit or
hurt of the action. They never behold a principle until it is lodged
in a person. They do not wish to be lovely, but to be loved. The
class of character like to hear of their faults: the other class do not
like to hear of faults; they worship events; secure to them a fact,
a connection, a certain chain of circumstances, and they will ask
100 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
no more. The hero sees that the event is ancillary: it must follow
him. A given order of events has no power to secure to him the
satisfaction which the imagination attaches to it; the soul of good-
ness escapes from any set of circumstances, whilst prosperity belongs
to a certain mind, and will introduce that power and victory which
is its natural fruit, into any order of events. No change of circum-
stances can repair a defect of character. We boast our emancipation
from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is
through a transfer of the idolatry. What have I gained, that I no
longer immolate a bull to Jove, or to Neptune, or a mouse to
Hecate; that I do not tremble before the Eumenides, or the Cath-
olic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic Judgment-day, — if I quake at
opinion, the public opinion, as we call it; or at the threat of assault,
or contumely, or bad neighbors, or poverty, or mutilation, or at the
rumor of revolution, or of murder? If I quake, what matters it
what I quake at? Our proper vice takes form in one or another
shape, according to the sex, age, or temperament of the person, and,
if we are capable of fear, will readily find terrors. The covetousness
or the malignity which saddens me, when I ascribe it to society,
is my own. I am always environed by myself. On the other part,
rectitude is a perpetual victory, celebrated not by cries of joy, but
by serenity, which is joy fixed or habitual. It is disgraceful to fly
to events for confirmation of our truth and worth. The capitalist
does not run every hour to the broker, to coin his advantages into
current money of the realm; he is satisfied to read in the quotations
of the market, that his stocks have risen. The same transport which
the occurrence of the best events in the best order would occasion
me, I must learn to taste purer in the perception that my position
is every hour meliorated, and does already command those events
I desire. That exultation is only to be checked by the foresight of an
order of things so excellent, as to throw all our prosperities into the
deepest shade.
The face which character wears to me is self-sufficingness. I revere
the person who is richest; so that I cannot think of him as alone,
or poor, or exiled, or unhappy, or a client, but as perpetual patron,
benefactor, and beatified man. Character is centrality, the impossi-
bility of being displaced or overset. A man should give us a sense
CHARACTER I 89
of mass. Society is frivolous, and shreds its day into scraps, its
conversation into ceremonies and escapes. But if I go to see an
ingenious man, I shall think myself poorly entertained if he give
me nimble pieces of benevolence and etiquette; rather he shall
stand stoutly in his place, and let me apprehend, if it were only his
resistance; know that I have encountered a new and positive quality;
— great refreshment for both of us. It is much, that he does not
accept the conventional opinions and practices. That nonconformity
will remain a goad and remembrancer, and every inquirer will have
to dispose of him, in the first place. There is nothing real or useful
that is not a seat of war. Our houses ring with laughter and personal
and critical gossip, but it helps little. But the uncivil, unavailable
man, who is a problem and a threat to society, whom it cannot let
pass in silence, but must either worship or hate, — and to whom all
parties feel related, both the leaders of opinion, and the obscure and
eccentric, — he helps; he puts America and Europe in the wrong, and
destroys the scepticism which says, "man is a doll, let us eat and
drink, 'tis the best we can do," by illuminating the untried and
unknown. Acquiescence in the establishment, and appeal to the
public, indicate infirm faith, heads which are not clear, and which
must see a house built, before they can comprehend the plan of it.
The wise man not only leaves out of his thought the many, but
leaves out the few. Fountains, fountains, the self-moved, the ab-
sorbed, the commander because he is commanded, the assured, the
primary, — they are good; for these announce the instant presence
of supreme power.
Our action should rest mathematically on our substance. In na-
ture, there are no false valuations, A pound of water in the ocean-
tempest has no more gravity than in a mid-summer pond. All things
work exactly according to their quality, and according to their quan-
tity; attempt nothing they cannot do, except man only. He has
pretension: he wishes and attempts things beyond his force. I read
in a book of English memoirs, "Mr. Fox (afterwards Lord Holland)
said, he must have the Treasury; he had served up to it, and would
have it." Xenophon and his Ten Thousand were quite equal to
what they attempted, and did it; so equal, that it was not suspected
to be a grand and inimitable exploit. Yet there stands that fact un-
1 90 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
repeated, a high-water-mark in military history. Many have at-
tempted it since, and not been equal to it. It is only on reality, that
any power of action can be based. No institution will be better than
the institutor. I knew an amiable and accomplished person who
undertook a practical reform, yet I was never able to find in him
the enterprise of love he took in hand. He adopted it by ear and
by the understanding from the books he had been reading. All his
action was tentative, a piece of the city carried out into the fields,
and was the city still, and no new fact, and could not inspire en-
thusiasm. Had there been something latent in the man, a terrible
undemonstrated genius agitating and embarrassing his demeanor,
we had watched for its advent. It is not enough that the intellect
should see the evils, and their remedy. We shall still postpone our
existence, nor take the ground to which we are entitled, whilst it is
only a thought and not a spirit that incites us. We have not yet
served up to it.
These are properties of life, and another trait is the notice of in-
cessant growth. Men should be intelligent and earnest. They must
also make us feel, that they have a controlling happy future, open-
ing before them, which sheds a splendor on the passing hour. The
hero is misconceived and misreported: he cannot therefore wait
to unravel any man's blunders: he is again on his road, adding
new powers and honors to his domain, and new claims on your
heart, which will bankrupt you, if you have loitered about the old
things, and have not kept your relation to him, by adding to your
wealth. New actions are the only apologies and explanations of old
ones, which the noble can bear to offer or to receive. If your friend
has displeased you, you shall not sit down to consider it, for he has
already lost all memory of the passage, and has doubled his power
to serve you, and, ere you can rise up again, will burden you with
blessings.
We have no pleasure in thinking of a benevolence that is only
measured by its works. Love is inexhaustible, and if its estate is
wasted, its granary emptied, still cheers and enriches, and the man,
though he sleep, seems to purify the air, and his house to adorn the
landscape and strengthen the laws. People always recognize this
difference. We know who is benevolent, by quite other means than
CHARACTER I9I
the amount of subscription to soup-societies. It is only low merits
that can be enumerated. Fear, when your friends say to you what
you have done well, and say it through; but when they stand with
uncertain timid looks of respect and half-dislike, and must suspend
their judgment for years to come, you may begin to hope. Those
who hve to the future must always appear selfish to those who live
to the present. Therefore it was droll in the good Riemer, who
has written memoirs of Goethe, to make out a list of his donations
and good deeds, as, so many hundred thalers given to Stilling, to
Hegel, to Tischbein: a lucrative place found for Professor Voss, a
post under the Grand Duke for Herder, a pension for Meyer, two
professors recommended to foreign universities, &c., &c. The long-
est Hst of specifications of benefit, would look very short. A man
is a poor creature, if he is to be measured so. For, all these, of course,
are exceptions; and the rule and hodiernal life of a good man is
benefaction. The true charity of Goethe is to be inferred from the
account he gave Dr. Eckermann, of the way in which he had
spent his fortune. "Each bon-mot of mine has cost a purse of gold.
Half a million of my own money, the fortune I inherited, my
salary, and the large income derived from my writings for fifty years
back, have been expended to instruct me in what I now know. I
have besides seen," &c.
I own it is but poor chat and gossip to go to enumerate traits of
this simple and rapid power, and we are painting the Ughtning with
charcoal; but in these long nights and vacations, I like to console
myself so. Nothing but itself can copy it. A word warm from the
heart enriches me. I surrender at discretion. How death-cold is lit-
erary genius before this fire of life! These are the touches that
reanimate my heavy soul, and give it eyes to pierce the dark of
nature. I find, where I thought myself poor, there was I most rich.
Thence comes a new intellectual exaltation, to be again rebuked by
some new exhibition of character. Strange alternation of attraction
and repulsion! Character repudiates intellect, yet excites it; and
character passes into thought, is published so, and then is ashamed
before new flashes of moral worth.
Character is nature in the highest form. It is of no use to ape it,
or to contend with it. Somewhat is possible of resistance, and of
192 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
persistence, and of creation, to this power, which will foil all emu-
lation.
This masterpiece is best where no hands but nature's have been
laid on it. Care is taken that the greatly-destined shall slip up into
life in the shade, with no thousand-eyed Athens to watch and
blazon every new thought, every blushing emotion of young genius.
Two persons lately, — very young children of the most high God, —
have given me occasion for thought. When I explored the source
of their sanctity, and charm for the imagination, it seemed as if each
answered, "From my non-conformity: I never listened to your
people's law, or to what they call their gospel, and wasted my time.
I was content with the simple rural poverty of my own; hence this
sweetness: my work never reminds you of that; — is pure of that."
And nature advertises me in such persons, that, in democratic
America, she will not be democratized. How cloistered and consti-
tutionally sequestered from the market and from scandal! It was
only this morning, that I sent away some wild flowers of these
wood-gods. They are a relief from literature, — these fresh draughts
from the sources of thought and sentiment; as we read, in an age
of polish and criticism, the first lines of written prose and verse
of a nation. How captivating is their devotion to their favorite
books, whether ^schylus, Dante, Shakspeare, or Scott, as feeling
that they have a stake in that book: who touches that, touches them;
— and especially the total solitude of the critic, the Patmos of thought
from which he writes, in unconsciousness of any eyes that shall ever
read this writing. Could they dream on still, as angels, and not wake
to comparisons, and to be flattered! Yet some natures are too good
to be spoiled by praise, and wherever the vein of thought reaches
down into the profound, there is no danger from vanity. Solemn
friends will warn them of the danger of the head's being turned by
the flourish of trumpets, but they can afford to smile. I remember
the indignation of an eloquent Methodist at the kind admonitions
of a Doctor of Divinity, — "My friend, a man can neither be praised
nor insulted." But forgive the counsels; they are very natural. I
remember the thought which occurred to me when some ingenious
and spiritual foreigners came to America, was, Have you been vie-
CHARACTER 1 93
timized in being brought hither ? — or, prior to that, answer me this,
"Are you victimizable?"
As I have said, nature keeps these sovereignties in her own hands,
and however pertly our sermons and discipHnes would divide some
share of credit, and teach that the laws fashion the citizen, she goes
her own gait, and puts the wisest in the wrong. She makes very
light of gospels and prophets, as one who has a great many more
to produce, and no excess of time to spare on any one. There is a
class of men, individuals of which appear at long intervals, so
eminently endowed with insight and virtue, that they have been
unanimously saluted as divine, and who seem to be an accumula-
tion of that power we consider. Divine persons are character
born, or, to borrow a phrase from Napoleon, they are victory or-
ganized. They are usually received with ill-will, because they are
new, and because they set a bound to the exaggeration that has been
made of the personality of the last divine person. Nature never
rhymes her children, nor makes two men alike.
When we see a great man, we fancy a resemblance to some his-
torical person, and predict the sequel of his character and fortune,
a result which is sure to disappoint. None will ever solve the prob-
lem of his character according to our prejudice, but only in his own
high unprecedented way. Character wants room; must not be
crowded on by persons, nor be judged from glimpses got in the
press of affairs or on few occasions. It needs perspective, as a great
building. It may not, probably does not, form relations rapidly;
and we should not require rash explanation, either on the popular
ethics, or on our own, of its action.
I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the
Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait which the artist
recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy. We
have seen many counterfeits, but we are born believers in great
men. How easily we read in old books, when men were few, of the
smallest action of the patriarchs. We require that a man should be
so large and columnar in the landscape, that it should deserve to be
recorded, that he arose, and girded up his loins, and departed to
such a place. The most credible pictures are those of majestic men
194 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
who prevailed at their entrance, and convinced the senses; as hap-
pened to the eastern magian who was sent to test the merits of
Zertusht or Zoroaster. When the Yunani sage arrived at Balkh,
the Persians tell us, Gushtasp appointed a day on which the mobeds
of every country should assemble, and a golden chair was placed
for the Yunani sage. Then the beloved of Yezdam, the prophet
Zertusht, advanced into the midst of the assembly. The Yunani
sage, on seeing that chief, said, "This form and this gait cannot lie,
and nothing but truth can proceed from them." Plato said, it was
impossible not to believe in the children of the gods, "though they
should speak without probable or necessary arguments." I should
think myself very unhappy in my associates, if I could not credit
the best things in history. "John Bradshaw," says Milton, "appears
like a consul, from whom the fasces are not to depart with the
year; so that not on the tribunal only but throughout his life, you
would regard him as sitting in judgment upon kings." I find it
more credible, since it is anterior information, that one man should
]{now heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so many men should
know the world. "The virtuous prince confronts the gods, without
any misgiving. He waits a hundred ages till a sage comes, and does
not doubt. He who confronts the gods, without any misgiving,
knows heaven; he who waits a hundred ages until a sage comes,
without doubting, knows men. Hence the virtuous prince moves,
and for ages shows empire the way." But there is no need to seek
remote examples. He is a dull observer whose experience has not
taught him the reaUty and force of magic, as well as of chemistry.
The coldest precisian cannot go abroad without encountering in-
explicable influences. One man fastens an eye on him, and the
graves of the memory render up their dead; the secrets that make
him wretched either to keep or to betray, must be yielded; — another,
and he cannot speak, and the bones of his body seem to lose their
cartilage; the entrance of a friend adds grace, boldness, and elo-
quence to him; and there are persons, he cannot choose but remem-
ber, who gave a transcendant expansion to his thought, and kindled
another life in his bosom.
What is so excellent as strict relations of amity, when they spring
from this deep root? The sufficient reply to the sceptic, who doubts
CHARACTER 195
the power and the furniture of man, is in that possibility of joyful
intercourse with persons, which makes the faith and practice of all
reasonable men. I know nothing which life has to offer so satis-
fying as the profound good understanding, which can subsist, after
much exchange of good offices, between two virtuous men, each of
whom is sure of himself, and sure of his friend. It is a happiness
which postpones all other gratifications, and makes politics, and
commerce, and churches, cheap. For, when men shall meet as they
ought, each a benefactor, a shower of stars, clothed with thoughts,
with deeds, with accomplishments, it should be the festival of
nature which all things announce. Of such friendship, love in the
sexes is the first symbol, as all other things are symbols of love.
Those relations to the best men, which, at one time, we reckoned
the romances of youth, become, in the progress of the character, the
most solid enjoyment.
If it were possible to live in right relations with men! — if we could
abstain from asking anything of them, from asking their praise, or
help, or pity, and content us with compelling them through the
virtue of the eldest laws! Could we not deal with a few persons, —
with one person, — after the unwritten statutes, and make an experi-
ment of their efficacy ? Could we not pay our friend the compliment
of truth, of silence, of forbearing? Need we be so eager to seek him?
If we are related, we shall meet. It was a tradition of the ancient
world, that no metamorphosis could hide a god from a god; and
there is a Greek verse which runs,
The Gods are to each other not unknown.
Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity; they gravitate to
each other, and cannot otherwise: —
When each the other shall avoid
Shall each by each be most enjoyed.
Their relation is not made, but allowed. The gods must seat them-
selves without seneschal in our Olympus, and as they can install
themselves by seniority divine. Society is spoiled if pains are taken,
if the associates are brought a mile to meet. And if it be not society,
it is a mischievous, low, degrading jangle, though made up of the
196 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
best. All the greatness of each is kept back, and every foible in pain-
ful activity, as if the Olympians should meet to exchange snuff-boxes.
Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we are
hunted by some fear or command behind us. But if suddenly we
encounter a friend we pause; our heat and hurry look foolish
enough; now pause, now possession, is required, and the power to
swell the moment from the resources of the heart. The moment is
all, in all noble relations.
A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the hope
of the heart. Our beatitude waits for the fulfilment of these two
in one. The ages are opening this moral force. All force is the
shadow or symbol of that. Poetry is joyful and strong, as it draws
its inspiration thence. Men write their names on the world, as they
are filled with this. History has been mean; our nations have been
mobs; we have never seen a man: that divine form we do not yet
know, but only the dream and prophecy of such: we do not know
the majestic manners which belong to him, which appease and
exalt the beholder. We shall one day see that the most private is
the most public energy, that quality atones for quantity, and gran-
deur of character acts in the dark, and succors them who never saw
it. What greatness has yet appeared, is beginnings and encourage-
ments to us in this direction. The history of those gods and saints
which the world has written, and then worshipped, are documents
of character. The ages have exulted in the manners of a youth who
owed nothing to fortune, and who was hanged at the Tyburn of
his nation, who, by the pure quality of his nature, shed an epic
splendor around the facts of his death, which has transfigured every
particular into an universal symbol for the eyes of mankind. This
great defeat is hitherto our highest fact. But the mind requires a
victory to the senses, a force of character which will convert judge,
jury, soldier, and king; which will rule animal and mineral virtues,
and blend with the courses of sap, of rivers, of winds, of stars, and
of moral agents.
If we cannot attain at a bound to these grandeurs at least, let us
do them homage. In society, high advantages are set down to the
possessor, as disadvantages. It requires the more wariness in our
private estimates. I do not forgive in my friends the failure to know
CHARACTER 197
a fine character, and to entertain it with thankful hospitaUty. When
at last, that which we have always longed for, is arrived, and shines
on us with glad rays out of that far celestial land, then to be coarse,
then to be critical, and treat such a visitant with the jabber and
suspicion of the streets, argues a vulgarity that seems to shut the
doors of heaven. This is confusion, this the right insanity, when the
soul no longer knows its own, nor where its allegiance, its religion,
are due. Is there any religion but this, to know, that, wherever in the
wide desert of being, the holy sentiment we cherish has opened into
a flower, it blooms for me? if none sees it I see it; I am aware, if I
alone, of the greatness of the fact. Whilst it blooms, I will keep sab-
bath or holy time, and suspend my gloom, and my folly and jokes.
Nature is indulged by the presence of this guest. There are many
eyes that can detect and honor the prudent and household virtues;
there are many that can discern Genius on his starry track, though
the mob is incapable; but when that love which is all-suffering, all-
abstaining, all-aspiring, which has vowed to itself, that it will be a
wretch and also a fool in this world, sooner than soil its white hands
by any compliances, comes into our streets and houses, — only the
pure and aspiring can know its face, and the only compliment they
can pay it, is to own it.
MANNERS
(1844)
How near to good is what is fair!
Which we no sooner see,
But with the lines and outward air
Our senses taken be.
Again yourselves compose,
And now put all the aptness on
Of Figure, that Proportion
Or Color can disclose;
That if those silent arts were lost,
Design and Picture, they might boast
From you a newer ground,
Instructed by the heightening sense
Of dignity and reverence
In their true motions found.
— Ben Jonson.
HALF the world, it is said, knows not how the other half live.
Our Exploring Expedition saw the Feejee islanders getting
their dinner of? human bones; and they are said to eat their
own wives and children. The husbandry of the modern inhabitants
of Gournou (west of old Thebes) is philosophical to a fault. To set
up their housekeeping, nothing is requisite but two or three earthen
pots, a stone to grind meal, and a mat which is the bed. The house,
namely, a tomb, is ready without rent or taxes. No rain can pass
through the roof, and there is no door, for there is no want of one,
as there is nothing to lose. If the house do not please them, they
walk out and enter another, as there are several hundreds at their
command. "It is somewhat singular," adds Belzoni, to whom we
owe this account, "to talk of happiness among people who live in
sepulchres, among the corpses and rags of an ancient nation which
they know nothing of." In the deserts of Borgoo, the rock-Tibboos
still dwell in caves, like cliff-swallows, and the language of these
199
200 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
negroes is compared by their neighbors to the shrieking of bats, and
to the whistHng of birds Again, the Bornoos have no proper names;
individuals are called after their height, thickness, or other accidental
quality, and have nicknames merely. But the salt, the dates, the
ivory, and the gold, for which these horrible regions are visited, find
their way into countries, where the purchaser and consumer can
hardly be ranked in one race with these cannibals and man-stealers;
countries where man serves himself with metals, wood, stone, glass,
gum, cotton, silk, and wool; honors himself with architecture; writes
laws, and contrives to execute his will through the hands of many
nations; and, especially, establishes a select society, running through
all the countries of intelligent men, a self-constituted aristocracy, or
fraternity of the best, which, without written law or exact usage of
any kind, perpetuates itself, colonizes every new-planted island, and
adopts and makes its own whatever personal beauty or extraordinary
native endowment anywhere appears.
What fact more conspicuous in modern history, than the creation
of the gentleman ? Chivalry is that, and loyalty is that, and, in Eng-
lish literature, half the drama, and all the novels, from Sir Philip
Sidney to Sir Walter Scott, paint this figure. The word gentleman,
which, like the word Christian, must hereafter characterize the
present and the few preceding centuries, by the importance attached
to it, is a homage to personal and incommunicable properties. Friv-
olous and fantastic additions have got associated with the name,
but the steady interest of mankind in it must be attributed to the
valuable properties which it designates. An element which unites
all the most forcible persons of every country; makes them intel-
ligible and agreeable to each other, and is somewhat so precise,
that it is at once felt if an individual lack the masonic sign, cannot
be any casual product, but must be an average result of the character
and faculties universally found in men. It seems a certain permanent
average; as the atmosphere is a permanent composition, while so
many gases are combined only to be decompounded. Comme il
fata, is the Frenchman's description of good society, as we must be.
It is a spontaneous fruit of talents and feelings of precisely that class
who have most vigor, who take the lead in the world of this hour,
and, though far from pure, far from constituting the gladdest and
MANNERS 201
highest tone of human feeUng, is as good as the whole society per-
mits it to be. It is made of the spirit, more than of the talent of men,
and is a compound result, into which every great force enters as an
ingredient, namely, virtue, wit, beauty, wealth, and power.
There is something equivocal in all the words in use to express
the excellence of manners and social cultivation, because the quan-
tities are fluctional, and the last effect is assumed by the senses as
the cause. The word gentleman has not any correlative abstract
to express the quality. Gentility is mean, and gentilesse is obsolete.
But we must keep alive in the vernacular, the distinction between
fashion, a word of narrow and often sinister meaning, and the heroic
character which the gentleman imports. The usual words, however,
must be respected: they will be found to contain the root of the
matter. The point of distinction in all this class of names, as courtesy,
chivalry, fashion, and the like, is, that the flower and fruit, not the
grain of the tree, are contemplated. It is beauty which is the aim
this time, and not worth. The result is now in question, although
our words intimate well enough the popular feeling, that the af>-
pearance supposes a substance. The gentleman is a man of truth,
lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his behavior,
not in any manner dependent and servile either on persons, or
opinions, or possessions. Beyond this fact of truth and real force,
the word denotes good-nature or benevolence; manhood first, and
then gentleness. The popular notion certainly adds a condition of
ease and fortune; but that is a natural result of personal force and
love, that they should possess and dispense the goods of the world.
In times of violence, every eminent person must fall in with many
opportunities to approve his stoutness and worth; therefore every
man's name that emerged at all from the mass in the feudal ages,
ratdes in our ear like a flourish of trumpets. But personal force
never goes out of fashion. That is still paramount to-day, and, in
the moving crowd of good society, the men of valor and reality are
known, and rise to their natural place. The competition is trans-
ferred from war to politics and trade, but the personal force appears
readily enough in these new arenas.
Power first, or no leading class. In politics and in trade, bruisers
and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks. God knows
202 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door; but whenever used in
strictness, and with any emphasis, the name will be found to point
at original energy. It describes a man standing in his own right,
and working after untaught methods. In a good lord, there must
first be a good animal, at least to the extent of yielding the incom-
parable advantage of animal spirits. The ruling class must have
more, but they must have these, giving in every company the sense
of power, which makes things easy to be done which daunt the wise.
The society of the energetic class, in their friendly and festive meet-
ings, is full of courage, and attempts which intimidate the pale
scholar. The courage which girls exhibit is like a battle of Lundy's
Lane, or a sea fight. The intellect relies on memory to make some
supplies to face these extemporaneous squadrons. But memory is
a base mendicant with basket and badge, in the presence of these
sudden masters. The rulers of society must be up to the work of
the world, and equal to their versatile office: men of the right
Caesarian pattern, who have great range of affinity. I am far from
believing the timid maxim of Lord Falkland, ("that for ceremony
there must go two to it; since a bold fellow will go through the
cunningest forms,") and am of opinion that the gentleman is the
bold fellow whose forms are not to be broken through; and only
that plenteous nature is rightful master, which is the complement
of whatever person it converses with. My gentleman gives the law
where he is; he will outpray saints in chapel, outgeneral veterans
in the field, and outshine all courtesy in the hall. He is good com-
pany for pirates, and good with academicians; so that it is useless
to fortify yourself against him; he has the private entrance to all
minds, and I could as easily exclude myself, as him. The famous
gentlemen of Asia and Europe have been of this strong type;
Saladin, Sapor, the Cid, Julius Caesar, Scipio, Alexander, Pericles,
and the lordliest personages. They sat very carelessly in their chairs,
and were too excellent themselves to value any condition at a high
rate.
A plentiful fortune is reckoned necessary, in the popular judg-
ment, to the completion of this man of the world: and it is a material
deputy which walks through the dance which the first has led.
Money is not essential, but this wide affinity is, which transcends the
MANNERS 203
habits of clique and caste, and makes itself felt by men of all classes.
If the aristocrat is only valid in fashionable circles, and not with
truckmen, he will never be a leader in fashion; and if the man of the
people cannot speak on equal terms with the gentleman, so that the
gentleman shall perceive that he is already really of his own order, he
is not to be feared. Diogenes, Socrates, and Epaminondas, are gentle-
men of the best blood, who have chosen the condition of poverty,
when that of wealth was equally open to them. I use these old
names, but the men I speak of are my contemporaries. Fortune
will not supply to every generation one of these well-appointed
knights, but every collection of men furnishes some example of
the class: and the politics of this country, and the trade of every
town, are controlled by these hardy and irresponsible doers, who
have invention to take the lead, and a broad sympathy which puts
them in fellowship with crowds, and makes their action popular.
The manners of this class are observed and caught with devotion
by men of taste. The association of these masters with each other,
and with men intelligent of their merits, is mutually agreeable and
stimulating. The good forms, the happiest expressions of each, are
repeated and adopted. By swift consent, everything superfluous is
dropped, everything graceful is renewed. Fine manners show them-
selves formidable to the uncultivated man. They are a subtler science
of defence to parry and intimidate; but once matched by the skill
of the other party, they drop the point of the sword, — points and
fences disappear, and the youth finds himself in a more transparent
atmosphere, wherein Ufe is a less troublesome game, and not a
misunderstanding rises between the players. Manners aim to facili-
tate life, to get rid of impediments, and bring the man pure to
energize. They aid our dealing and conversation, as a railway aids
travelling, by getting rid of all avoidable obstructions of the road,
and leaving nothing to be conquered but pure space. These forms
very soon become fixed, and a fine sense of propriety is cultivated
with the more heed, that it becomes a badge of social and civil dis-
tinction. Thus grows up Fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most
puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and fol-
lowed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.
There exists a strict relation between the class of power, and the
204 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
exclusive and polished circles. The last are always filled or filling
from the first. The strong men usually give some allowance even
to the petulances of fashion, for that affinity they find in it. Napo-
leon, child of the revolution, destroyer of the old noblesse, never
ceased to court the Faubourg St. Germain : doubtless with the feeling,
that fashion is a homage to men of his stamp. Fashion, though in a
strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed:
it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great,
but the children of the great : it is a hall of the Past. It usually sets
its face against the great of this hour. Great men are not commonly
in its halls: they are absent in the field: they are working, not tri-
umphing. Fashion is made up of their children; of those, who,
through the value and virtue of somebody, have acquired lustre to
their name, marks of distinction, means of cultivation and gener-
osity, and, in their physical organization, a certain health and ex-
cellence, which secures to them, if not the highest power to work,
yet high power to enjoy. The class of power, the working heroes, the
Cortez, the Nelson, the Napoleon, see that this is the festivity and
permanent celebration of such as they; that fashion is funded talent;
is Mexico, Marengo, and Trafalgar beaten out thin; that the brilliant
names of fashion run back to just such busy names as their own,
fifty or sixty years ago. They are the sowers, their sons shall be the
reapers, and their sons, in the ordinary course of things, must yield
the possession of the harvest to new competitors with keener eyes
and stronger frames. The city is recruited from the country. In
the year 1805, it is said, every legitimate monarch in Europe was
imbecile. The city would have died out, rotted, and exploded long
ago, but that it was reinforced from the fields. It is only country
which came to town day before yesterday, that is city and court
to-day.
Aristocracy and fashion are certain inevitable results. These mu-
tual selections are indestructible. If they provoke anger in the least
favored class, and the excluded majority revenge themselves on the
excluding minority, by the strong hand, and kill them, at once a
new class finds itself at the top, as certainly as cream rises in a bowl
of milk: and if the people should destroy class after class, until two
men only were left, one of these would be the leader, and would be
MANNERS 205
involuntarily served and copied by the other. You may keep this
minority out of sight and out of mind, but it is tenacious of life,
and is one of the estates of the realm, I am the more struck with
this tenacity, when I see its work. It respects the administration of
such unimportant matters, that we should not look for any durability
in its rule. We sometimes meet men under some strong moral in-
fluence, as, a patriotic, a literary, a religious movement, and feel that
the moral sentiment rules man and nature. We think all other dis-
tinctions and ties will be slight and fugitive, this of caste or fashion,
for example; yet come from year to year, and see how permanent
that is, in this Boston or New York life of man, where, too, it has
not the least countenance from the law of the land. Not in Egypt
or in India a firmer or more impassable line. Here are associations
whose ties go over, and under, and through it, a meeting of mer-
chants, a military corps, a college-class, a fire-club, a professional
association, a political, a religious convention; — the persons seem to
draw inseparably near; yet, that assembly once dispersed, its mem-
bers will not in the year meet again. Each returns to his degree in
the scale of good society, porcelain remains porcelain, and earthen
earthen. The objects of fashion may be frivolous, or fashion may be
objectless, but the nature of this union and selection can be neither
frivolous nor accidental. Each man's rank in that perfect graduation
depends on some symmetry in his structure, or some agreement in
his structure to the symmetry of society. Its doors unbar instantane-
ously to a natural claim of their own kind. A natural gentleman
finds his way in, and will keep the oldest patrician out, who has
lost his intrinsic rank. Fashion understands itself; good-breeding
and personal superiority of whatever country readily fraternize with
those of every other. The chiefs of savage tribes have distinguished
themselves in London and Paris, by the purity of their tournure.
To say what good of fashion we can, — it rests on reality, and hates
nothing so much as pretenders; — to exclude and mystify pretenders,
and send them into everlasting "Coventry," is its delight. We con-
temn, in turn, every other gift of men of the world; but the habit
even in little and the least matters, of not appealing to any but our
own sense of propriety, constitutes the foundation of all chivalry.
There is almost no kind of self-reliance, so it be sane and propor-
206 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
tioned, which fashion does not occasionally adopt, and give it the
freedom of its saloons. A sainted soul is always elegant, and, if it
will, passes unchallenged into the most guarded ring. But so will
Jock the teamster pass, in some crisis that brings him thither, and
find favor, as long as his head is not giddy with the new circum-
stance, and the iron shoes do not wish to dance in waltzes and
cotillons. For there is nothing setded in manners, but the laws of
behavior yield to the energy of the individual. The maiden at her
first ball, the countryman at a city dinner, believes that there is a
ritual according to which every act and compliment must be per-
formed, or the faiUng party must be cast out of this presence. Later,
they learn that good sense and character make their own forms
every moment, and speak or abstain, take wine or refuse it, stay or
go, sit in a chair or sprawl with children on the floor, or stand on their
head, or what else soever, in a new and aboriginal way: and that
strong will is always in fashion, let who will be unfashionable. All
jhat fashion demands is composure, and self-content. A circle of
men perfecdy well-bred would be a company of sensible persons, in
which every man's native manners and character appeared. If the
fashionist have not this quality, he is nothing. We are such lovers
of self-reliance, that we excuse in a man many sins, if he will show
us a complete satisfaction in his position, which asks no leave to be,
of mine, or any man's good opinion. But any deference to some
eminent man or woman of the world, forfeits all privilege of nobility.
He is an underling: I have nothing to do with him; I will speak
with his master. A man should not go where he cannot carry his
whole sphere or society with him, — not bodily, the whole circle of
his friends, but atmospherically. He should preserve in a new com-
pany the same attitude of mind and reality of relation, which his
daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his best beams, and
will be an orphan in the merriest club. "If you could see Vich Ian
Vohr with his tail on! " But Vich Ian Vohr must always carry
his belongings in some fashion, if not added as honor, then severed
as disgrace.
There will always be in society certain persons who are mercuries
of its approbation, and whose glance will at any time determine for
the curious their standing in the world. These are the chamberlains
MANNERS 207
of the lesser gods. Accept their coldness as an omen of grace with
the loftier deities, and allow them all their privilege. They are clear
in their office, nor could they be thus formidable, without their own
merits. But do not measure the importance of this class by their
pretension, or imagine that a fop can be the dispenser of honor and
shame. They pass also at their just rate; for how can they otherwise,
in circles which exist as a sort of herald's office for the sifting of
character.?
As the first thing man requires of man, is reality, so, that appears
in all the forms of society. We pointedly, and by name, introduce
the parties to each other. Know you before all heaven and earth,
that this is Andrew, and this is Gregory; — they look each other in
the eye; they grasp each other's hand, to identify and signalize each
other. It is a great satisfaction. A gentleman never dodges: his
eyes look straight forward, and he assures the other party, first of all,
that he has been met. For what is it that we seek, in so many visits
and hospitalities? Is it your draperies, pictures, and decorations?
Or, do we not insatiably ask. Was a man in the house ? I may easily
go into a great household where there is much substance, excellent
provision for comfort, luxury, and taste, and yet not encounter there
any Amphitryon, who shall subordinate these appendages. I may
go into a cottage, and find a farmer who feels that he is the man
I have come to see, and fronts me accordingly. It was therefore
a very natural point of old feudal etiquette, that a gendeman who
received a visit, though it were of his sovereign, should not leave his
roof, but should wait his arrival at the door of his house. No house,
though it were the Tuileries, or the Escurial, is good for anything
without a master. And yet we are not often gratified by this hos-
pitahty. Every body we know surrounds himself with a fine house,
fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipage, and all manner of toys,
as screens to interpose between himself and his guest. Does it not
seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing
so much as a full rencontre front to front with his fellow? It were
unmerciful, I know, quite to abolish the use of these screens, which
are of eminent convenience, whether the guest is too great, or too
little. We call together many friends who keep each other in play,
or, by luxuries and ornaments we amuse the young people, and
208 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
guard our retirement. Or if, perchance, a searching reaUst comes
to our gate, before whose eye we have no care to stand, then again
we run to our curtain, and hide ourselves as Adam at the voice of
the Lord God in the garden. Cardinal Caprara, the Pope's legate
at Paris, defended himself from the glances of Napoleon, by an
immense pair of green spectacles. Napoleon remarked them, and
speedily managed to rally them off: and yet Napoleon, in his turn,
was not great enough with eight hundred thousand troops at his
back, to face a pair of freeborn eyes, but fenced himself with eti-
quette, and within triple barriers of reserve: and, as all the world
knows from Madame de Stael, was wont, when he found himself
observed, to discharge his face of all expression. But emperors and
rich men are by no means the most skilful masters of good manners.
No rent-roll nor army-list can dignify skulking and dissimulation:
and the first point of courtesy must always be truth, as really all the
forms of good-breeding point that way.
I have just been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt's translation, Montaigne's
account of his journey into Italy, and am struck with nothing more
agreeably than the self-respecting fashions of the time. His arrival
in each place, the arrival of a gentleman of France, is an event of
some consequence. Wherever he goes, he pays a visit to whatever
prince or gentleman of note resides upon his road, as a duty to him-
self and to civilization. When he leaves any house in which he has
lodged for a few weeks, he causes his arms to be painted and hung
up as a perpetual sign to the house, as was the custom of gentlemen.
The complement of this graceful self-respect, and that of all the
points of good breeding I most require and insist upon, is deference.
I like that every chair should be a throne, and hold a king. I prefer
a tendency to stateliness, to an excess of fellowship. Let the in-
communicable objects of nature and the metaphysical isolation of
man teach us independence. Let us not be too much acquainted.
I would have a man enter his house through a hall filled with heroic
and sacred sculptures, that he might not want the hint of tranquillity
and self-poise. We should meet each morning, as from foreign
countries, and spending the day together, should depart at night,
as into foreign countries. In all things I would have the island of a
man inviolate. Let us sit apart as the gods, talking from peak to
MANNERS 209
peak all around Olympus. No degree of affection need invade this
religion. This is myrrh and rosemary to keep the other sweet. Lov-
ers should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all
sUdes into confusion and meanness. It is easy to push this deference
to a Chinese etiquette; but coolness and absence of heat and haste
indicate fine qualities. A gentleman makes no noise: a lady is
serene. Proportionate is our disgust at those invaders who fill a
studious house with blast and running, to secure some paltry con-
venience. Not less I dislike a low sympathy of each with his neigh-
bor's needs. Must we have a good understanding with one another's
palates ? as foolish people who have lived long together, know when
each wants salt or sugar. I pray my companion, if he wishes for
bread, to ask me for bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic,
to ask me for them, and not to hold out his plate, as if I knew
already. Every natural function can be dignified by deliberation and
privacy. Let us leave hurry to slaves. The compliments and cere-
monies of our breeding should signify, however remotely, the recol-
lection of the grandeur of our destiny.
The flower of courtesy does not very well bide handling, but if
we dare to open another leaf, and explore what parts go to its con-
formation, we shall find also an intellectual quaHty. To the leaders
of men, the brain as well as the flesh and the heart must furnish
a proportion. Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine per-
ceptions. Men are too coarsely made for the delicacy of beautiful
carriage and customs. It is not quite sufficient to good breeding, a
union of kindness and independence. We imperatively require a
perception of, and a homage to beauty in our companions. Other
virtues are in request in the field and workyard, but a certain degree
of taste is not to be spared in those we sit with. I could better eat
with one who did not respect the truth or the laws, than with a
sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule the world,
but at short distances, the senses are despotic. The same discrimina-
tion of fit and fair runs out, if with less vigor, into all parts of Ufe.
The average spirit of the energetic class is good sense, acting under
certain limitations and to certain ends. It entertains every natural
gift. Social in its nature, it respects everything which tends to unite
men. It delights in measure. The love of beauty is mainly the love
210 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
of measure or proportion. The person who screams, or uses the
superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-
rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You must
have genius, or a prodigious usefulness, if you will hide the want
of measure. This perception comes in to polish and perfect the parts
of the social instruments. Society will pardon much to genius and
special gifts, but, being in its nature a convention, it loves what is
conventional, or what belongs to coming together. That makes
the good and bad of manners, namely, what helps or hinders fellow-
ship. For, fashion is not good sense absolute, but relative; not good
sense private, but good sense entertaining company. It hates corners
and sharp points of character, hates quarrelsome, egotistical, solitary,
and gloomy people; hates whatever can interfere with total blend-
ing of parties; whilst it values all peculiarities as in the highest de-
gree refreshing, which can consist with good fellowship. And be-
sides the general infusion of wit to heighten civility, the direct
splendor of intellectual power is ever welcome in fine society as the
costliest addition to its rule and its credit.
The dry light must shine in to adorn our festival, but it must be
tempered and shaded, or that will also offend. Accuracy is essential
to beauty, and quick perceptions to politeness, but not too quick
perceptions. One may be too punctual and too precise. He must
leave the omniscience of business at the door, when he comes into
the palace of beauty. Society loves Creole natures, and sleepy, lan-
guishing manners, so that they cover sense, grace, and goodwill;
the air of drowsy strength, which disarms criticism; perhaps because
such a person seems to reserve himself for the best of the game, and
not spend himself on surfaces; an ignoring eye, which does not see
the annoyances, shifts and inconvenience, that cloud the brow and
smother the voice of the sensitive.
Therefore, besides personal force and so much perception as
constitutes unerring taste, society demands in its patrician class
another element already intimated, which it significantly terms good-
nature, expressing all degrees of generosity, from the lowest willing-
ness and faculty to oblige, up to the heights of magnanimity and
love. Insight we must have, or we shall run against one another, and
miss the way to our food; but intellect is selfish and barren. The
MANNERS 211
secret of success in society, is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A
man who is not happy in the company, cannot find any word in his
memory that will fit the occasion. All his information is a litde im-
pertinent. A man who is happy there, finds in every turn of the
conversation equally lucky occasions for the introduction of that
which he has to say. The favorites of society and what it calls whole
souls, are able men, and of more spirit than wit, who have no un-
comfortable egodsm, but who exacdy fill the hour and the company,
contented and contendng, at a marriage or a funeral, a ball or a jury,
a water party or a shooting-match. England, which is rich in gentle-
men, furnished, in the beginning of the present century, a good
model of that genius which the world loves, in Mr. Fox, who added
to his great abilides the most social disposition, and real love of men.
Parliamentary history has few better passages than the debate, in
which Burke and Fox separated in the House of Commons; when
Fox urged on his old friend the claims of old friendship with such
tenderness, that the house was moved to tears. Another anecdote
is so close to my matter, that I must hazard the story. A tradesman
who had long dunned him for a note of three hundred guineas,
found him one day coundng gold, and demanded payment: "No,"
said Fox, "I owe this money to Sheridan : it is a debt of honor : if an
accident should happen to me, he has nothing to show." "Then,"
said the creditor, "I change my debt into a debt of honor," and tore
the note in pieces. Fox thanked the man for his confidence, and
paid him, saying, "his debt was of older standing, and Sheridan
must wait." Lover of Liberty, friend of the Hindoo, friend of the
African slave, he possessed a great personal popularity; and Na-
poleon said of him on the occasion of his visit to Paris, in 1805,
"Mr. Fox will always hold the first place in an assembly at the
Tuileries."
We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy of courtesy, when-
ever we insist on benevolence as its foundation. The painted phan-
tasm Fashion rises to cast a species of derision on what we say. But
I will neither be driven from allowance to Fashion as a symbolic
institution, nor from the belief that love is the basis of courtesy.
We must obtain that, if we can; but by all means we must affirm
this. Life owes much of its spirit to these sharp contrasts. Fashion
212 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
which affects to be honor, is often, in all men's experience, only a
ballroom-code. Yet, so long as it is the highest circle, in the imagina-
tion of the best heads on the planet, there is something necessary and
excellent in it; for it is not to be supposed that men have agreed to
be the dupes of anything preposterous; and the respect which these
mysteries inspire in the most rude and sylvan characters, and the
curiosity with which details of high life are read, betray the univer-
sality of the love of cultivated manners. I know that a comic dis-
parity would be felt, if we should enter the acknowledged "first
circles" and apply these terrific standards of justice, beauty, and
benefit to the individuals actually found there. Monarchs and
heroes, sages and lovers, these gallants are not. Fashion has many
classes and many rules of probation and admission; and not the
best alone. There is not only the right of conquest, which genius
pretends, — the individual, demonstrating his natural aristocracy best
of the best; — ^but less claims will pass for the time; for Fashion loves
lions, and points, like Circe, to her horned company. This gentle-
man is this afternoon arrived from Denmark; and that is my Lord
Ride, who came yesterday from Bagdat; here is Captain Friese, from
Cape Turnagain; and Captain Symmes, from the interior of the
earth; and Monsieur Jovaire, who came down this morning in a
balloon; Mr. Hobnail, the reformer; and Reverend Jul Bat, who has
converted the whole torrid zone in his Sunday-school; and Signor
Torre del Greco, who extinguished Vesuvius by pouring into it the
Bay of Naples; Spahi, the Persian ambassador; and Tul Wil Shan,
the exiled nabob of Nepaul, whose saddle is the new moon. — But
these are monsters of one day, and to-morrow will be dismissed to
their holes and dens; for, in these rooms, every chair is waited for.
The artist, the scholar, and, in general, the clerisy wins its way up
into these places, and gets represented here, somewhat on this footing
of conquest. Another mode is to pass through all the degrees, spend-
ing a year and a day in St. Michael's Square, being steeped in Co-
logne water, and perfumed, and dined, and introduced, and properly
grounded in all the biography, and politics, and anecdotes of the
boudoirs.
Yet these fineries may have grace and wit. Let there be grotesque
sculpture about the gates and offices of temples. Let the creed and
MANNERS 213
commandments even have the saucy homage of parody. The forms
of poUteness universally express benevolence in superlative degrees.
What if they are in the mouths of selfish men, and used as means
of selfishness? What if the false gentleman almost bows the true
out of the world? What if the false gentleman contrives so to ad-
dress his companion, as civilly to exclude all others from his dis-
course, and also to make them feel excluded? Real service will not
lose its nobleness. All generosity is not merely French and senti-
mental; nor is it to be concealed, that Uving blood and a passion
of kindness does at last distinguish God's gentleman from Fashion's.
The epitaph of Sir Jenkin Grout is not wholly unintelligible to the
present age. "Here lies Sir Jenkin Grout, who loved his friend, and
persuaded his enemy: what his mouth ate, his hand paid for: what
his servants robbed, he restored: if a woman gave him pleasure, he
supported her in pain: he never forgot his children: and whoso
touched his finger, drew after it his whole body." Even the line of
heroes is not utterly extinct. There is still ever some admirable per-
son in plain clothes, standing on the wharf, who jumps in to rescue
a drowning man; there is still some absurd inventor of charities;
some guide and comforter of runaway slaves; some friend of Poland;
some Philhellene; some fanatic who plants shade-trees for the second
and third generation, and orchards when he is grown old; some
well-concealed piety; some just man happy in an ill-fame; some
youth ashamed of the favors of fortune, and impatiently casting
them on other shoulders. And these are the centres of society, on
which it returns for fresh impulses. These are the creators of Fash-
ion, which is an attempt to organize beauty of behavior. The beauti-
ful and the generous are, in the theory, the doctors and apostles of
this church: Scipio, and the Cid, and Sir Philip Sidney, and Wash-
ington, and every pure and valiant heart, who worshipped Beauty
by word and by deed. The persons who constitute the natural
aristocracy, are not found in the actual aristocracy, or, only on its
edge; as the chemical energy of the spectrum is found to be greatest
just outside of the spectrum. Yet that is the infirmity of the senes-
chals, who do not know their sovereign, when he appears. The
theory of society supposes the existence and sovereignty of these. It
divines afar off their coming. It says with the elder gods, —
214 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
As Heaven and Earth are fairer far
Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;
And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth,
In form and shape compact and beautiful;
So, on our heels a fresh perfection treads;
A power, more strong in beauty, born of us,
And fated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old Darkness:
for, 'tis the eternal law.
That first in beauty shall be first in might.
Therefore, within the ethnical circle of good society, there is a
narrower and higher circle, concentration of its light, and flower of
courtesy, to which there is always a tacit appeal of pride and refer-
ence, as to its inner and imperial court, the parliament of love and
chivalry. And this is constituted of those persons in whom heroic
dispositions are native, with the love of beauty, the delight in society,
and the power to embellish the passing day. If the individuals who
compose the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the guarded
blood of centuries, should pass in review, in such manner as that
we could, at leisure, and critically inspect their behavior, we might
find no gentleman, and no lady; for, although excellent specimens
of courtesy and high-breeding would gratify us in the assemblage,
in the particulars, we should detect offence. Because, elegance comes
of no breeding, but of birth. There must be romance of character,
or the most fastidious exclusion of impertinences will not avail. It
must be genius which takes that direction : it must be not courteous,
but courtesy. High behavior is as rare in fiction, as it is in fact.
Scott is praised for the fidelity with which he painted the demeanor
and conversation of the superior classes. Certainly, kings and queens,
nobles and great ladies, had some right to complain of the absurdity
that had been put in their mouths, before the days of Waverley;
but neither does Scott's dialogue bear criticism. His lords brave
each other in smart epigrammatic speeches, but the dialogue is in
costume, and does not please on the second reading: it is not warm
with life. In Shakspeare alone, the speakers do not strut and bridle,
the dialogue is easily great, and he adds to so many titles that of
being the best-bred man in England, and in Christendom. Once
or twice in a lifetime we are permitted to enjoy the charm of noble
MANNERS 215
manners, in the presence of a man or woman who have no bar in
their nature, but whose character emanates freely in their word and
gesture. A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; a beautiful
behavior is better than a beautiful form: it gives a higher pleasure
than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts. A man is but
a little thing in the midst of the objects of nature, yet, by the
moral quaUty radiating from his countenance, he may abolish all
considerations of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty
of the world. I have seen an individual, whose manners, though
wholly within the conventions of elegant society, were never learned
there, but were original and commanding, and held out protec-
tion and prosperity; one who did not need the aid of a court-suit,
but carried the holiday in his eye; who exhilarated the fancy by
flinging wide the doors of new modes of existence; who shook off the
captivity of etiquette, with happy, spirited bearing, good-natured and
free as Robin Hood; yet with the port of an emperor, — if need be,
calm, serious, and fit to stand the gaze of millions.
The open air and the fields, the street and public chambers, are the
places where Man executes his will; let him yield or divide the
sceptre at the door of the house. Woman, with her instinct of be-
havior, instantly detects in man a love of trifles, any coldness or
imbeciUty, or, in short, any want of that large, flowing, and magnani-
mous deportment, which is indispensable as an exterior in the hall.
Our American institutions have been friendly to her, and at this
moment, I esteem it a chief felicity of this country, that it excels in
women. A certain awkward consciousness of inferiority in the men,
may give rise to the new chivalry in behalf of Woman's Rights.
Certainly, let her be as much better placed in the laws and in social
forms, as the most zealous reformer can ask, but I confide so entirely
in her inspiring and musical nature, that I believe only herself can
show us how she shall be served. The wonderful generosity of her
sentiments raises her at times into heroical and godlike regions, and
verifies the pictures of Minerva, Juno, or Polymnia; and, by the firm-
ness with which she treads her upward path, she convinces the coars-
est calculators that another road exists, than that which their feet
know. But besides those who make good in our imagination the
place of muses and of Delphic Sibyls, are there not women who fill
2l6 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
our vase with wine and roses to the brim, so that the wine runs
over and fills the house with perfume; who inspire us with courtesy;
who unloose our tongues, and we speak; who anoint our eyes, and
we see? We say things we never thought to have said; for once, our
walls of habitual reserve vanished, and left us at large; we were chil-
dren playing with children in a wide field of flowers. Steep us, we
cried, in these influences, for days, for weeks, and we shall be sunny
poets, and will write out in many-colored words the romance that
you are. Was it Hafiz or Firdousi that said of his Persian Lilla,
She was an elemental force, and astonished me by her amount of
life, when I saw her day after day radiating, every instant, redundant
joy and grace on all around her. She was a solvent powerful to recon-
cile all heterogeneous persons into one society: like air or water, an
element of such a great range of aflSnities, that it combines readily
with a thousand substances. Where she is present, all others will
be more than they are wont. She was a unit and whole, so that what-
soever she did, became her. She had too much sympathy and desire
to please, than that you could say, her manners were marked with
dignity, yet no princess could surpass her clear and erect demeanor
on each occasion. She did not study the Persian grammar, nor the
books of the seven poets, but all the poems of the seven seemed to be
written upon her. For, though the bias of her nature was not to
thought, but to sympathy, yet was she so perfect in her own nature,
as to meet intellectual persons by the fulness of her heart, warming
them by her sentiments; believing, as she did, that by dealing nobly
with all, all would show themselves noble.
I know that this Byzantine pile of chivalry or Fashion, which
seems so fair and picturesque to those who look at the contemporary
facts for science or for entertainment, is not equally pleasant to all
spectators. The constitution of our society makes it a giant's castle
to the ambitious youth who have not found their names enrolled in
its Golden Book, and whom it has excluded from its coveted honors
and privileges. They have yet to learn that its seeming grandeur is
shadowy and relative: it is great by their allowance: its proudest
gates will fly open at the approach of their courage and virtue. For
the present distress, however, of those who are predisposed to suffer
MANNERS 217
from the tyrannies of this caprice, there are easy remedies. To remove
your residence a couple of miles, or at most four, will commonly
relieve the most extreme susceptibility. For, the advantages which
fashion values, are plants which thrive in very confined localities, in a
few streets, namely. Out of this precinct, they go for nothing; are
of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, in war, in the
nuptial society, in the literary or scientific circle, at sea, in friendship,
in the heaven of thought or virtue.
But we have lingered long enough in these painted courts. The
worth of the thing signified must vindicate our taste for the emblem.
Everything that is called fashion and courtesy humbles itself before
the cause and fountain of honor, creator of titles and dignities,
namely, the heart of love. This is the royal blood, this is the fire,
which, in all countries and contingencies, will work after its kind,
and conquer and expand all that approaches it. This gives new
meanings to every fact. This impoverishes the rich, suffering no
grandeur but its own. What is rich? Are you rich enough to help
anybody ? to succor the unfashionable and the eccentric ? rich enough
to make the Canadian in his wagon, the itinerant with his consul's
paper which commends him "To the charitable," the swarthy Italian
with his few broken words of English, the lame pauper hunted by
overseers from town to town, even the poor insane or besotted wreck
of man or woman, feel the noble exception of your presence and your
house, from the general bleakness and stoniness; to make such feel
that they were greeted with a voice which made them both remem-
ber and hope? What is vulgar, but to refuse the claim on acute and
conclusive reasons? What is gentle, but to allow it, and give their
heart and yours one holiday from the national caution? Without
the rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar. The king of Schiraz could
not afford to be so bountiful as the poor Osman who dwelt at his
gate. Osman had a humanity so broad and deep, that although his
speech was so bold and free with the Koran, as to disgust all the
dervishes, yet was there never a poor outcast, eccentric, or insane
man, some fool who had cut off his beard, or who had been mutilated
under a vow, or had a pet madness in his brain, but fled at once to
him, — that great heart lay there so sunny and hospitable in the centre
of the country, that it seemed as if the instinct of all sufferers drew
2l8 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
them to his side. And the madness which he harbored, he did not
share. Is not this to be rich? this only to be rightly rich?
But I shall hear without pain, that I play the courtier very ill, and
talk of that which I do not well understand. It is easy to see, that
what is called by distinction society and fashion, has good laws as
well as bad, has much that is necessary, and much that is absurd.
Too good for banning, and too bad for blessing, it reminds us of a
tradition of the pagan mythology, in any attempt to settle its char-
acter. "I overheard Jove, one day," said Silenus, "talking of destroying
the earth; he said, it had failed; they were all rogues and vixens, who
went from bad to worse, as fast as the days succeeded each other.
Minerva said, she hoped not; they were only ridiculous little crea-
tures, with this odd circumstance, that they had a blur, or indetermi-
nate aspect, seen far or seen near; if you called them bad, they would
appear so; if you called them good, they would appear so; and there
was no person or action among them, which would not puzzle her
owl, much more all Olympus, to know whether it was fundamen-
tally bad or good."
GIFTS
(1844)
Gifts of one who loved me, —
'Twas high time they came;
When he ceased to love me,
Time they stopped for shame.
IT is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the
world owes the world more than the world can pay, and ought
to go into chancery, and be sold. I do not think this general
insolvency, which involves in some sort all the population, to be the
reason of the difficulty experienced at Christmas and New Year, and
other times, in bestowing gifts; since it is always so pleasant to be
generous, though very vexatious to pay debts. But the impediment
lies in the choosing. If, at any time, it comes into my head, that a
present is due from me to somebody, I am puzzled what to give,
until the opportunity is gone. Flowers and fruits are always fit
presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of
beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world. These gay natures
contrast with the somewhat stern countenance of ordinary nature:
they are like music heard out of a work-house. Nature does not
cocker us: we are children, not pets: she is not fond: everything is
dealt to us without fear or favor, after severe universal laws. Yet
these delicate flowers look like the frolic and interference of love
and beauty. Men use to tell us that we love flattery, even though we
are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance
enough to be courted. Something like that pleasure, the flowers give
us : what am I to whom these sweet hints are addressed ? Fruits are
acceptable gifts, because they are the flower of commodities, and
admit of fantasdc values being attached to them. If a man should
send to me to come a hundred miles to visit him, and should set
before me a basket of fine summer-fruit, I should think there was
some proportion between the labor and the reward.
219
220 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
For common gifts, necessity makes pertinences and beauty every
day, and one is glad when an imperative leaves him no option, since
if the man at the door have no shoes, you have not to consider
whether you could procure him a paint-box. And as it is always
pleasing to see a man eat bread, or drink water, in the house or out
of doors, so it is always a great satisfaction to supply these first wants.
Necessity does everything well. In our condition of universal de-
pendence, it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the judge of his
necessity, and to give all that is asked, though at great inconvenience.
If it be a fantastic desire, it is better to leave to others the office of
punishing him. I can think of many parts I should prefer playing to
that of the Furies. Next to things of necessity, the rule for a gift,
which one of my friends prescribed, is, that we might convey to
some person that which properly belonged to his character, and was
easily associated with him in thought. But our tokens of compliment
and love are for the most part barbarous. Rings and other jewels are
not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself.
Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem; the
shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor,
coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of
her own sewing. This is right and pleasing, for it restores society in
so far to its primary basis, when a man's biography is conveyed in his
gift, and every man's wealth is an index of his merit. But it is a cold,
lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy me something,
which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's. This
is fit for kings, and rich men who represent kings, and a false state
of property, to make presents of gold and silver stuffs, as a kind of
symbolical sin-offering, or payment of black-mail.
The law of benefits is a difficult channel, which requires careful
sailing, or rude boats. It is not the office of a man to receive gifts.
How dare you give them ? We wish to be self -sustained. We do not
quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of
being bitten. We can receive anything from love, for that is a way of
receiving it from ourselves; but not from any one who assumes to
bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there
seems something of degrading dependence in living by it.
GIFTS 221
Brother, if Jove to thee a present make,
Take heed that from his hands thou nothing take.
We ask the whole. Nothing less will content us. We arraign society,
if it do not give us besides earth, and fire, and water, opportunity,
love, reverence, and objects of veneration.
He is a good man who can receive a gift well. We are either glad
or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming. Some violence,
I think, is done, some degradation borne, when I rejoice or grieve at
a gift. I am sorry when my independence is invaded or when a gift
comes from such as do not know my spirit, and so the act is not
supported; and if the gift pleases me overmuch, then I should be
ashamed that the donor should read my heart, and see that I love his
commodity and not him. The gift, to be true, must be the flowing
of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him. When
the waters are at level, then my goods pass to him, and his to me.
All his are mine, all mine his. I say to him, How can you give me
this pot of oil, or this flagon of wine, when all your oil and wine is
mine, which belief of mine this gift seems to deny ? Hence the fitness
of beautiful, not useful things for gifts. This giving is flat usurpation,
and therefore when the beneficiary is ungrateful, as all beneficiaries
hate all Timons, not at all considering the value of the gift, but look-
ing back to the greater store it was taken from, I rather sympathize
with the beneficiary, than with the anger of my lord Timon. For, the
expectation of gratitude is mean, and is continually punished by the
total insensibility of the obliged person. It is a great happiness to get
off without injury and heart-burning, from one who has had the ill
luck to be served by you. It is a very onerous business, this of being
served, and the debtor naturally wishes to give you a slap. A golden
text for these gentlemen is that which I so admire in the Buddhist,
who never thanks, and who says, "Do not flatter your benefactors."
The reason of these discords I conceive to be, that there is no com-
mensurabiUty between a man and any gift. You cannot give any-
thing to a magnanimous person. After you have served him, he at
once puts you in debt by his magnanimity. The service a man ren-
ders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he
knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had
222 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-
will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him
seems small. Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil,
is so incidental and at random, that we can seldom hear the acknowl-
edgments of any person who would thank us for a benefit, without
some shame and humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke,
but must be content with an obUque one; we seldom have the satis-
faction of yielding a direct benefit, which is directly received. But
rectitude scatters favors on every side without knowing it, and
receives with wonder the thanks of all people.
I fear to breathe any treason against the majesty of love, which is
the genius and god of gifts, and to whom we must not affect to pre-
scribe. Let him give kingdoms or flower-leaves indifferendy. There
are persons, from whom we always expect fairy tokens; let us not
cease to expect them. This is prerogative, and not to be limited by
our municipal rules. For the rest, I like to see that we cannot be
bought and sold. The best of hospitality and of generosity is also not
in the will but in fate. I find that I am not much to you; you do not
need me; you do not feel me; then am I thrust out of doors, though
you proffer me house and lands. No services are of any value, but
only likeness. When I have attempted to join myself to others by
services, it proved an intellectual trick, — no more. They eat your
service like apples, and leave you out. But love them, and they feel
you, and delight in you all the time.
NATURE
(1844)
The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine time folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its laboring heart,
Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west,
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows,
And hints the future which it owes.
THERE are days which occur in this climate, at almost any
season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection,
when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a
harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these
bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have
heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of
Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satis-
faction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and
tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for with a little
more assurance in that pure October weather, which we distinguish
by the name of the Indian Summer. The day, immeasurably long,
sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived
through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary
places do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, the sur-
prised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great
and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his
back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanc-
tity which shames our religions, and reaUty which discredits our
heroes. Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs
every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come
to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the
224 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap
us in their bosom. How wilUngly we would escape the barriers
which render them comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication
and second thought, and suffer nature to entrance us. The tempered
light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and
heroic. The anciently reported spells of these places creep on us. The
stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks, almost gleam like iron on the
excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live
with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or
church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal
year. How easily we might walk onward into the opening land-
scape, absorbed by new pictures, and by thoughts fast succeeding
each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was crowded
out of the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the pres-
ent, and we were led in triumph by nature.
These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These
are plain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come to our own,
and make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the
schools would persuade us to despise. We never can part with it;
the mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the
ground, to our eyes, and hands, and feet. It is firm water: it is cold
flame : what health, what affinity ! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear
friend and brother, when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in
this honest face, and takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us
out of our nonsense. Cities give not the human senses room enough.
We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and
require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath. There
are all degrees of natural influence, from these quarantine powers of
nature, up to her dearest and gravest ministrations to the imagination
and the soul. There is the bucket of cold water from the spring, the
wood-fire to which the chilled traveller rushes for safety, — and there
is the sublime moral of autumn and of noon. We nestle in nature,
and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we
receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which calls us to solitude,
and fortell the remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which
romance and reality meet. I think, if we should be rapt away into
all that we dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel and
NATURE 225
Uriel, the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture.
It seems as if the day was not wholly profane, in which we have
given heed to some natural object. The fall of snowflakes in a still
air, preserving to each crystal its perfect form; the blowing of sleet
over a wide sheet of water, and over plains, the waving rye-field, the
mimic waving of acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets
whiten and ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees and flowers
in glassy lakes; the musical steaming odorous south wind, which con-
verts all trees to windharps; the crackling and spurting of hemlock
in the flames; or of pine logs, which yield glory to the walls and
faces in the sitting-room, — these are the music and pictures of the
most ancient religion. My house stands in low land, with limited
outlook, and on the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to
the shore of our little river; and with one stroke of the paddle, I
leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of vil-
lages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of
sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter
without noviciate and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible
beauty: we dip our hands in this painted element: our eyes are bathed
in these lights and forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal revel,
the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty,
power and taste, ever decked and enjoyed, establishes itself on the
instant. These sunset clouds, these delicately emerging stars, with
their private and ineffable glances, signify it and proffer it. I am
taught the poorness of our invention, the ugliness of towns and
palaces. Art and luxury have early learned that they must work as
enchantment and sequel to this original beauty. I am over-instructed
for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to please. I cannot go
back to toys. I am grown expensive and sophisticated. I can no
longer live without elegance: but a countryman shall be my master
of revels. He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and
virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and
how to come to these enchantments, is the rich and royal man. Only
as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid,
can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of
their hanging gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and
preserves, to back their faulty personality with these strong acces-
226 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
series. I do not wonder that the landed interest should be invincible
in the state with these dangerous auxiliaries. These bribe and invite;
not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, but these tender and
poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. We heard what the rich
man said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine, and his company,
but the provocation and point of the invitation came out of these
beguiling stars. In their soft glances, I see what men strove to realize
in some Versailles, or Paphos, or Ctesiphon. Indeed, it is the magical
lights of the horizon, and the blue sky for the background, which
save all our works of art, which were otherwise bawbles. When the
rich tax the poor with servility and obsequiousness, they should con-
sider the effect of men reputed to be the possessors of nature, on
imaginative minds. Ah! if the rich were rich as the poor fancy
riches! A boy hears a military band play on the field at night, and he
has kings and queens, and famous chivalry palpably before him.
He hears the echoes of a horn in a hill country, in the Notch Moun-
tains, for example, which converts the mountains into an ^olian
harp, and this supernatural tiralira restores to him the Dorian my-
thology, Apollo, Diana, and all divine hunters, and huntresses. Can
a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily beautiful! To the poor young
poet, thus fabulous is his picture of society; he is loyal; he respects the
rich; they are rich for the sake of his imagination; how poor his
fancy would be, if they were not rich! That they have some high-
fenced grove, which they call a park; that they live in larger and
better-garnished saloons than he has visited, and go in coaches, keep-
ing only the society of the elegant, to watering-places, and to distant
cities, are the groundwork from which he has delineated estates of
romance, compared with which their actual possessions are shanties
and paddocks. The muse herself betrays her son, and enhances the
gifts of wealth and well-born beauty, by a radiation out of the air,
and clouds, and forests that skirt the road, — a certain haughty favor,
as if from patrician genii to patricians, a kind of aristocracy in nature,
a prince of the power of the air.
The moral sensibility which makes Edens and Tempes so easily,
may not be always found, but the material landscape is never far off.
We can find these enchantments without visiting the Como Lake, or
the Madeira Islands. We exaggerate the praises of local scenery. In
NATURE 227
every landscape, the point o£ astonishment is the meeting of the sky
and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock as well as from
the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the
brownest, homeUest common, with all the spiritual magnificence
which they shed on the Campagna, or on the marble deserts of
Egypt. The uproUed clouds and the colors of morning and evening,
will transfigure maples and alders. The difference between landscape
and landscape is small, but there is great difference in the beholders.
There is nothing so wonderful in any particular landscape, as the
necessity of being beautiful under which every landscape lies. Nature
cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty breaks in everywhere.
But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on this topic,
which schoolmen called natura naturata, or nature passive. One can
hardly speak directly of it without excess. It is as easy to broach in
mixed companies what is called "the subject of religion." A suscep-
tible person does not like to indulge his tastes in this kind, without
the apology of some trivial necessity: he goes to see a wood-lot, or
to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral from a remote
locality, or he carries a fowling-piece, or a fishing-rod. I suppose
this shame must have a good reason. A dilettantism in nature is
barren and unworthy. The fop of fields is no better than his brother
of Broadway. Men are naturally hunters and inquisitive of wood-
craft, and I suppose that such a gazetteer as wood-cutters and Indians
should furnish facts for, would take place in the most sumptuous
drawing-rooms of all the "Wreaths" and "Flora's chaplets" of the
book-shops; yet ordinarily, whether we are too clumsy for so subtle
a topic, or from whatever cause, as soon as men begin to write on
nature, they fall into euphuism. Frivolity is a most unfit tribute to
Pan, who ought to be represented in the mythology as the most con-
tinent of gods. I would not be frivolous before the admirable reserve
and prudence of time, yet I cannot renounce the right of returning
often to this old topic. The multitude of false churches accredits the
true religion. Literature, poetry, science, are the homage of man to
this unfathomed secret, concerning which no sane man can affect
an indifference or incuriosity. Nature is loved by what is best in us.
It is loved as the city of God, although, or rather because there is no
citizen. The sunset is unlike anything that is underneath it: it wants
228 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
men. And the beauty of nature must always seem unreal and mock-
ing, until the landscape has human figures, that are as good as itself.
If there were good men, there would never be this rapture in nature.
If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he
is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn
from the people, to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested
by the pictures and the architecture. The critics who complain of the
sickly separation of the beauty of nature from the thing to be done,
must consider that our hunting of the picturesque is inseparable from
our protest against false society. Man is fallen; nature is erect, and
serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or absence
of the divine sentiment in man. By fault of our dulness and selfish-
ness, we are looking up to nature, but when we are convalescent,
nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook with compunc-
tion : if our own life flowed with the right energy, we should shame
the brook. The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, and not with
reflex rays of sun and moon. Nature may be as selfishly studied as
trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology. Psychology, mes-
merism (with intent to show where our spoons are gone) ; and
anatomy and physiology, become phrenology and palmistry.
But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on
this topic, let us not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature,
natura naturans, the quick cause, before which all forms flee as the
driven snows, itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and
multitudes, (as the ancient represented nature by Proteus, a shep-
herd,) and in undescribable variety. It publishes itself in creatures,
reaching from particles and spicula, through transformation on trans-
formation to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate results
without a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is, a little motion, is all
that differences the bald, dazzling white, and deadly cold poles of
the earth from the prolific tropical climates. All changes pass with-
out violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless
space and boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the secularity
of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures, and
exchange our Mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We
knew nothing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn what
patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed,
NATURE 229
then before the rock is broken, and the first hchen race has disinte-
grated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door for
the remote Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona, to come in. How far
off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how inconceivably
remote is man! All duly arrive, and then race after race of men. It
is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to Plato, and
the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all must come, as
surely as the first atom has two sides.
Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second
secrets of nature : Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may
be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring. The whirling
bubble on the surface of a brook, admits us to the secret of the
mechanics of the sky. Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A little
water made to rotate in a cup explains the formation of the simpler
shells; the addition of matter from year to year, arrives at last at the
most complex form; and yet so poor is nature with all her craft, that,
from the beginning to the end of the universe, she has but one stuff,
— but one stuif with its two ends, to serve up all her dream-hke
variety. Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man,
it is still one stuff, and betrays the same properties.
Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her
own laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She
arms and equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth,
and, at the same time, she arms and equips another animal to destroy
it. Space exists to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird
with a few feathers, she gives him a petty omnipresence. The direc-
tion is forever onward, but the artist still goes back for materials, and
begins again with the first elements on the most advanced stage:
otherwise, all goes to ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to catch
a glance of a system in transition. Plants are the young of the world,
vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward toward con-
sciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their
imprisonment, rooted in the ground. The animal is the novice and
probationer of a more advanced order. The men, though young,
having tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are already
dissipated: the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no doubt,
when they come to consciousness, they too will curse and swear.
230 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Flowers so strictly belong to youth, that we adult men soon come to
feel, that their beautiful generations concern not us : we have had our
day; now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are
old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.
Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the eye,
from any one object the parts and properties of any other may be
predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall
would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as readily as the
city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great
intervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations from natural
life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest curled
courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and
aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is directly
related, there amid essences and billets-doux, to Himmaleh mountain-
chains, and the axis of the globe. If we consider how much we are
nature's, we need not be superstitious about towns, as if that terrific
or benefic force did not find us there also, and fashion cities. Nature
who made the mason, made the house. We may easily hear too much
of rural influences. The cool disengaged air of natural objects, makes
them enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures with red faces, and
we think we shall be as grand as they, if we camp out and eat roots;
but let us be men instead of woodchucks, and the oak and the elm
shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets of
silk.
This guilding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts
of the piece, and characterizes every law. Man carries the world in
his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought.
Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is
he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in
natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before
it was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recog-
nizing laws which bind the farthest regions of nature : moon, plant,
gas, crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense
knows its own, and recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical
experiment. The common sense of Franklin, Dalton, Davy, and
Black, is the same common sense which made the arrangements
which now it discovers.
NATURE 23 1
If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter action runs
also into organization. The astronomers said, "Give us matter and
a Httle motion, and we will construct the universe. It is not enough
that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one
shove to launch the mass, and generate the harmony of the centri-
fugal and centripetal forces. Once heave the ball from the hand,
and we can show how all this mighty order grew." — "A very unrea-
sonable postulate," said the metaphysicians, "and a plain begging of
the question. Could you not prevail to know the genesis of projec-
tion, as well as the continuation of it.''" Nature, meanwhile, had not
waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the impulse,
and the balls rolled. It was no great affair, a mere push, but the
astronomers were right in making much of it, for there is no end
to the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push propa-
gates itself through all the balls of the system, and through every
atom of every ball, through all the races of creatures, and through
the history and performances of every individual. Exaggeration is in
the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the
world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given
the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, to every creature
nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a
shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight generosity, a
drop too much. Without electricity the air would rot, and without
this violence of direction, which men and women have, without a
spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We aim
above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood
of exaggeration in it. And when now and then comes along some
sad, sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry a game is played, and
refuses to play, but blabs the secret; — how then? is the bird flown?
O no, the wary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier
youths, with a little more excess of direction to hold them fast to
their several aim; makes them a little wrong-headed in that direction
in which they are rightest, and on goes the game again with new
whirl, for a generation or two more. The child with his sweet
pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound,
without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned
to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread
232 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted
with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue,
which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature
has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has
tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the
bodily frame, by all these attitudes and exertions, — an end of the first
importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than
her own. This glitter, this opaline lustre plays round the top of
every toy to his eyes, to ensure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his
good. We are made alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let the
stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but
because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable
life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a
single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds,
that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that
hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity, that, at least,
one may replace the parent. All things betray the same calculated
profusion. The excess of fear with which the animal frame is
hedged round, shrinking from cold, starting at sight of a snake, or at
a sudden noise, protects us, through a multitude of groundless
alarms, from some one real danger at last. The lover seeks in mar-
riage his private felicity and perfection, with no prospective end;
and nature hides in his happiness her own end, namely, progeny,
or the perpetuity of the race.
But the craft with which the world is made, runs also into the
mind and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein
of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the
head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which
nature had taken to heart. Great causes are never tried on their
merits; but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the
partisans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not
less remarkable is the overfaith of each man in the importance of
what he has to do or say. The poet, the prophet, has a higher value
for what he utters than any hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. The
strong, self-complacent Luther declares with an emphasis, not to be
mistaken, that "God himself cannot do without wise men." Jacob
Behmen and George Fox betray their egotism in the pertinacity of
NATURE 233
their controversial tracts, and James Naylor once suffered himself
to be worshipped as the Christ. Each prophet comes presently to
identify himself with his thought, and to esteem his hat and shoes
sacred. However this may discredit such persons with the judicious,
it helps them with the people, as it gives heat, pungency, and pub-
licity to their words. A similar experience is not infrequent in private
hfe. Each young and ardent person writes a diary, in which, when
the hours of prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. The
pages thus written are, to him, burning and fragrant: he reads them
on his knees by midnight and by the morning star; he wets them with
his tears: they are sacred; too good for the world, and hardly yet to
be shown to the dearest friend. This is the man-child that is born to
the soul, and her life still circulates in the babe. The umbilical cord
has not yet been cut. After some time has elapsed, he begins to wish
to admit his friend to this hallowed experience, and with hesitation,
yet with firmness, exposes the pages to his view. Will they not burn
his eyes? The friend coldly turns them over, and passes from the
writing to conversation, with easy transition, which strikes the other
party with astonishment and vexation. He cannot suspect the writ-
ing itself. Days and nights of fervid life, of communion with angels
of darkness and of light, have engraved their shadowy characters on
that tear-stained book. He suspects the intelligence or the heart of
his friend. Is there then no friend? He cannot yet credit that one
may have impressive experience, and yet may not know how to put
his private fact into literature; and perhaps the discovery that wis-
dom has other tongues and ministers than we, that though we should
hold our peace, the truth would not the less be spoken, might check
injuriously the flames of our zeal. A man can only speak, so long as
he does not feel his speech to be partial and inadequate. It is partial,
but he does not see it to be so, whilst he utters it. As soon as he is
released from the instinctive and particular, and sees its partiality, he
shuts his mouth in disgust. For, no man can write anything, who
does not think that what he writes is for the time the history of the
world; or do anything well, who does not esteem his work to be of
importance. My work may be of none, but I must not think it of
none, or I shall not do it with impunity.
In like manner, there is throughout nature something mocking,
234 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
something that leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere, keeps no
faith with us. All promise outruns the performance. We live in a
system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other
end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere.
We are encamped in nature, not domesticated. Hunger and thirst
lead us on to eat and to drink; but bread and wine, mix and cook
them how you will, leave us hungry and thirsty, after the stomach is
full. It is the same with all our arts and performances. Our music,
our poetry, our language itself are not satisfacdons, but suggestions.
The hunger for wealth, which reduces the planet to a garden, fools
the eager pursuer. What is the end sought? Plainly to secure the
ends of good sense and beauty, from the intrusion of deformity or
vulgarity of any kind. But what an operose method! What a train
of means to secure a little conversation! This palace of brick and
stone, these servants, this kitchen, these stables, horses and equipage,
this bank-stock, and file of mortgages; trade to all the world, country-
house and cottage by the waterside, all for a little conversation, high,
clear, and spiritual! Could it not be had as well by beggars on the
highway ? No, all these things came from successive efforts of these
beggars to remove friction from the wheels of life, and give oppor-
tunity. Conversation, character, were the avowed ends; wealth was
good as it appeased the animal cravings, cured the smoky chimney,
silenced the creaking door, brought friends together in a warm and
quiet room, and kept the children and the dinner-table in a different
apartment. Thought, virtue, beauty, were the ends; but it was
known that men of thought and virtue sometimes had the headache,
or wet feet, or could lose good time whilst the room was getting
warm in winter days. Unluckily, in the exertions necessary to re-
move these inconveniences, the main attention has been diverted to
this object; the old aims have been lost sight of, and to remove
friction has come to be the end. That is the ridicule of rich men, and
Boston, London, Vienna, and now the governments generally of the
world, are cities and governments of the rich, and the masses are
not men, but poor men, that is, men who would be rich; this is the
ridicule of the class, that they arrive with pains and sweat and fury
nowhere; when all is done, it is for nothing. They are like one who
has interrupted the conversation of a company to make his speech,
NATURE 235
and now has forgotten what he meant to say. The appearance
strikes the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of aimless nations.
Were the ends of nature so great and cogent, as to exact this immense
sacrifice of men ?
Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is, as might be expected,
a similar effect on the eye from the face of external nature. There is
in woods and waters a certain enticement and flattery, together with
a failure to yield a present satisfaction. This disappointment is felt
in every landscape. I have seen the softness and beauty of the sum-
mer-clouds floating feathery overhead, enjoying, as it seemed, their
height and privilege of motion, whilst yet they appeared not so much
the drapery of this place and hour, as for looking to some pavilions
and gardens of festivity beyond. It is an odd jealousy: but the poet
finds himself not near enough to his object. The pine-tree, the river,
the bank of flowers before him, does not seem to be nature. Nature is
still elsewhere. This or this is but outskirt and far-off reflection and
echo of the triumph that has passed by, and is now at its glancing
splendor and heyday, perchance in the neighboring fields, or, if
you stand in the field, then in the adjacent woods. The present ob-
ject shall give you this sense of stillness that follows a pageant which
has just gone by. What splendid distance, what recesses of ineffable
pomp and loveliness in the sunset! But who can go where they are,
or lay his hand or plant his foot thereon? Off they fall from the
round world forever and ever. It is the same among the men and
women, as among the silent trees, always a referred existence, an
absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it, that beauty can
never be grasped ? in persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible?
The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm of his
maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven whilst he pursued
her as a star : she cannot be heaven, if she stoops to such a one as he.
What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance of that first pro-
jectile impulse, of this flattery and balking of so many well-meaning
creatures ? Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe a slight
treachery and derision ? Are we not engaged to a serious resentment
of this use that is made of us? Are we tickled trout, and fools of
nature? One look at the face of heaven and earth lays all petulance
at rest, and soothes us to wiser convictions. To the intelligent, nature
236 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
converts itself into a vast promise, and will not be rashly explained.
Her secret is untold. Many and many an CEdipus arrives: he has the
whole mystery teeming in his brain. Alas! the same sorcery has
spoiled his skill; no syllable can he shape on his lips. Her mighty
orbit vaults like the fresh rainbow into the deep, but no archangel's
wing was yet strong enough to follow it, and report of the return
of the curve. But it also appears, that our actions are seconded and
disposed to greater conclusions than we designed. We are escorted
on every hand through life by spiritual agents, and a beneficent pur-
pose lies in wait for us. We cannot bandy words with nature, or deal
with her as we deal with persons. If we measure our individual
forces against hers, we may easily feel as if we were the sport of an
insuperable destiny. But if, instead of identifying ourselves with
the work, we feel that the soul of the workman streams through
us, we shall find the peace of the morning dwelling first in our
hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and chemistry, and,
over them, of life, pre-existing within us in their highest form.
The uneasiness which the thought of our helplessness in the chain
of causes occasions us, results from looking too much at one condi-
tion of nature, namely, Motion. But the drag is never taken from
the wheel. Whenever the impulse exceeds, the Rest or Identity insin-
uates its compensation. All over the wide fields of earth grows the
prunella or self-heal. After every foolish day we sleep off the fumes
and furies of its hours; and though we are always engaged with
particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every
experiment the innate universal laws. These, while they exist in the
mind as ideas, stand around us in nature forever embodied, a present
sanity to expose and cure the insanity of men. Our servitude to
particulars betrays into a hundred foolish expectations. We antici-
pate a new era from the invention of a locomotive, or a balloon; the
new engine brings with it the old checks. They say that by electro-
magnetism, your salad shall be grown from the seed, whilst your
fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of our modern aims and
endeavors, — of our condensation and acceleration of objects: but
nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's life is but seventy
salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In these checks and
impossibilities, however, we find our advantage, not less than in the
NATURE 237
impulses. Let the victory fall where it will, we are on that side. And
the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the
centre to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every possibility,
lends that sublime lustre to death, which philosophy and religion have
too outwardly and literally striven to express in the popular doctrine
of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more excellent than the
report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent ball. The divine
circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the incarnation of a
thought, and turns to a thought, again, as ice becomes water and
gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is for-
ever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the virtue
and pungency of the influence on the mind, of natural objects,
whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized,
man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. That power which
does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle
its equal channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and distils its
essence into every drop of rain. Every moment instructs, and every
object: for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured
into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure;
it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor;
we did not guess its essence, until after a long time.
POLITICS
(1844)
Gold and iron are good Phoebus stabllsh must.
To buy iron and gold; When the Muses nine
All earth's fleece and food With the Virtues meet,
For their like are sold. Find to their design
Boded Merlin wise, An Adantic seat,
Proved Napoleon great, — By green orchard boughs
Nor kind nor coinage buys Fended from the heat.
Aught above its rate. Where the statesman ploughs
Fear, Craft, and Avarice Furrow for the wheat;
Cannot rear a State. When the Church is social worth,
Out of dust to build When the state-house is the hearth,
What is more than dust, — Then the perfect State is come,
Walls Amphion piled The republican at home.
IN dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institu-
tions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were
born: that they are not superior to the citizen: that every one of
them was once the act of a single man: every law and usage was a
man's expedient to meet a particular case; that they all are imitable,
all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better. Society
is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose,
with certain names, men, and institutions, rooted like oak-trees to
the centre, round which all arrange themselves the best they can.
But the old statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no such
roots and centres; but any particle may suddenly become the centre
of the movement, and compel the system to gyrate round it, as every
man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, does for a time,
and every man of truth, like Plato, or Paul, does forever. But politics
rest on necessary foundations, and cannot be treated with levity.
Republics abound in young civilians, who believe that the laws make
the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living,
and employments of the population, that commerce, education, and
239
240 RALPH WALDO EMERSON
religion, may be voted in or out; and that any measure, though it
were absurd, may be imposed on a people, if only you can get suf-
ficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish legisla-
tion is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting; that the State
must follow, and not lead the character and progress of the citizen;
the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; and they only who built
on Ideas, build for eternity; and that the form of government which
prevails, is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population
which permits it. The law is only a memorandum. We are super-
stitious, and esteem the statute somewhat: so much life as it has in
the character of living men, is its force. The statute stands there to
say, yesterday we agreed so and so, but how feel ye this article to-day."^
Our statute is a currency, which we stamp with our own portrait: it
soon becomes unrecognizable, and in process of time will return to
the mint. Nature is not democratic, nor limited monarchical, but
despotic, and will not be fooled or abated of any jot of her authority,
by the pertest of her sons: and as fast as the public mind is opened
to more intelligence, the code is seen to be brute and stammering.
It speaks not articulately, and must be made to. Meantime the educa-
tion of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and
simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and
prays, and paints to-day, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall
presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as
grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall
be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it
gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures. The history of the
State sketches in coarse outUne the progress of thought, and follows
at a distance the delicacy of culture and of aspiration.
The theory of politics, which has possessed the mind of men, and
which they have expressed the best they could in their laws and in
their revolutions, considers persons and property as the two objects
for whose protection government exists. Of persons, all have equal
rights, in virtue of being identical in nature. This interest, of course,
with its whole power demands a democracy.
